Why Phenom Talent CRM is Named a Leader by Everest Group

Many of the companies that are hiring, developing, and retaining quality talent with speed and accuracy have one thing in common: a talent CRM that combines intelligence, automation, and experience to seamlessly connect both external and internal candidates with sourcers, recruiters, hiring managers — and all the stakeholders in between — throughout every stage of the talent lifecycle. 

We’re proud to announce that Phenom was named a Leader in the Candidate Relationship Management (CRM) Platforms PEAK Matrix® Assessment 2023, proving its ability to deliver work-altering innovation for talent acquisition teams and dramatically improve recruiter efficiency through a comprehensive set of capabilities as part of its holistic, AI-powered platform.

Key Differentiators That Set Phenom Apart

Everest Group identifies Leaders as companies that successfully deliver capabilities based on performance, experiences, ability, and knowledge compared to alternatives in the market. 

Phenom CRM includes a comprehensive set of capabilities that exponentially improves the recruiting process — and experience — with AI and automation. It not only enables sourcers, recruiters, talent marketers, and hiring managers to build, engage and track external talent pipelines, it supports talent management in their internal sourcing efforts. 

By funneling all talent into a central location, teams can easily: 

• Match job seekers to relevant roles and opportunities 

• Nurture active and passive leads

• Engage current and past applicants

• Screen candidates with one-way interviews

• Automate interview scheduling to hire faster 

• Analyze where leads are in the hiring process and who ultimately gets hired

Phenom CRM leverages AI to create dynamic lists, fit scores and actionable insights that maximize recruiter productivity and enable proactive, data-driven decision making for knowledge worker hiring. With the AI-powered CRM, recruiting teams can prioritize engagements with best-fit talent based on experience, skills and location. It fully integrates with organizations’ career sites — without needing a separate CMS — to help source, rediscover, and engage candidates via chatbot or hyper-personalized 1:1 or 1:many campaigns sent through SMS, email or messaging apps. 

To support high-volume hiring use cases for frontline and hourly workers, Phenom CRM provides a combination of offerings — including automated screening and scheduling — that shrink the time between “hello” and hire from days to minutes.

Proven Results That Showcase ROI

A Total Economic Impact™ Of The Phenom Intelligent Talent Experience Platform conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Phenom also documented the following benefits specifically attributed to the Phenom CRM.

Cost Reduction From Decreasing Time To Fill:

Candidate pipelining. Phenom’s CRM provided recruiters with a database of potential applicants to pursue, and its AI capabilities helped recruiters find qualified candidates in that database. As a result, recruiters could rapidly develop a candidate pool for a posted role. The Phenom CRM included resumes of prior applicants sourced from an organization’s ATS and of other individuals who had joined the organization’s Phenom-based talent community.

Improved Recruiter Productivity:

Sourcing candidates. Phenom enabled organizations to automatically build a database of potential applicants and hires within their Phenom CRM through their ongoing talent acquisition efforts using the Phenom platform. Phenom’s AI capabilities then enabled recruiters to identify qualified candidates from that database, and thus reduced the time that a recruiter spent sourcing a candidate pool for a posted role.

This included easily revisiting resumes (brought into Phenom through the integration between Phenom and an organization’s applicant-tracking system) of prior applicants who had not been hired but appeared to be well-aligned with a current job posting, and pursuing individuals whose information was in the database because they had joined the organization’s talent community. All this leveraged a cross-organization CRM that grew over time — not a limited number of resumes captured on an individual recruiter’s hard drive.

In addition, Phenom’s AI-driven candidate recommendations and tools for scoring candidates increased recruiters’ confidence that their targeted candidates would be a good fit.

Nurturing candidate leads. Phenom replaced recruiters’ spreadsheets and manual effort with a CRM and automation, simplifying candidate nurturing.

Phenom also decreased the time that recruiters spent creating and using candidate shortlists. Instead, recruiters could set up saved dynamic lists that were automatically populated based on data captured in the CRM, and automatically email those short-listed candidates. Phenom provided recruiters with analytics that enabled them to determine a candidate’s level of engagement and if, when, and how to best follow up. 

Communicating with candidates, including automated interview scheduling. With Phenom, talent acquisition staff simplified and accelerated candidate interactions (e.g., by using text messaging) or even automated some of those interactions (e.g., with Phenom’s AI-powered conversational chatbot). Phenom AI Scheduling handled many administrative aspects of scheduling candidate interviews that were formerly addressed manually.

Streamlining and accelerating analysis. Phenom’s analytics reduced cumbersome manual analyses by recruiters, such as determining where their leads were in the hiring process and which of them ultimately got hired. 

Although most interviewees’ organizations leveraged recruiter time savings to enable an individual recruiter to manage a larger portfolio of searches comfortably and effectively, one interviewee said that their organization instead applied the freed-up hours to “higher-touch” recruiter-candidate interactions that had been infeasible before Phenom automated or reduced minutiae and administrative tasks.

Reduced spending on external recruiters. Because Phenom improved the effectiveness and efficiency of their talent acquisition efforts, the interviewees’ organizations decreased their use of external recruiters. 

How To Take The Next Step and Choose the Right CRM for Your Company

Whether organizations are seeking to automate their hiring processes for jobs that require minimal preparation, or infuse intelligence into hiring practices for roles that require immense preparation and credentials, Phenom CRM is at the core of a holistic set of capabilities that align to organizational needs to attract, hire, retain and grow talent.

Before investing in such a critical piece of technology for both your talent acquisition and talent management teams, we recommend working your way through the following checklist to ensure the solution you choose will meet your business requirements and be agile enough to adapt to your evolving needs. 

Step 1: Conduct a thorough needs assessment

Before you begin your HR tech search, identify how the entire organization will reap the benefits of a new software solution. When you’re in the discovery process, don’t avoid the tough questions.

• If you currently use a CRM, what are its limitations?

• If you don’t use a CRM, what are the hiring challenges you’re trying to overcome?

• What are your HR goals and operational needs 1 year, 3 years, and 5 years post-implementation?

• What is your estimated budget?

Step 2: Determine must-have product capabilities

What specific features and functionality should your CRM have? By understanding what your team needs, you can choose the right platform to support them so they can reach their goals. Look for solutions that:

• Offer fit scoring based on experience, skill requirements, and location

• Capture passive candidate information

• Uses automation to schedule and reschedule interviews

• Automatically track recruiter and candidate activity

• Recommend personalized and actionable insights

• Feature an intuitive and mobile-friendly user interface

• Leverage predictive intelligence and deep learning technology

Campaign capabilities

• Can your team manage and track email communications through the software?

• Does it integrate with SMS / WhatsApp and allow direct messaging from the recruitment CRM?

• Does the CRM show candidate data and measure campaign performance?

• Event management capabilities

• Does it make managing and tracking recruiting events simple?

• What about after the event? Can you follow up with prospects who did and did not attend?

Candidate rediscovery capabilities

• Does it allow for the rediscovery of past candidates (silver medalists)?

• Is it easy to reach out to them with new opportunities that better fit their skill sets?

Additional capabilities

• Are the vendor’s products and features able to break down the hiring process by stage?

• Does the software offer project management tools like to-do lists, contact management, and scheduling capabilities?

• Do you have the ability to create custom automations?

• Are the dashboards user-friendly and easy to use?

• Can you collect and measure the recruiting data efficiently?

Step 3: Identify essential integrations

It’s crucial that your CRM integrates with existing software, such as social media, job boards, testing platforms, and more. By synchronizing data, recruiters and candidates benefit from a more seamless experience.

• Is the CRM part of a larger platform that can support and strengthen more areas of the talent experience?

• Can the vendor’s software integrate with other platforms? If so, which ones?

• Are third-party platforms needed to connect the vendor’s software and existing systems?

Step 4: Get to know the CRM vendor

By asking questions about the vendor’s onboarding process, training capabilities, customer support, and other supplemental programs, you can gather a better understanding of what to expect after you’ve successfully integrated the chosen software into your processes.

• How many customers do they have?

• Are they well-rated on software review sites such as G2, Capterra, etc.?

• Do they offer hands-on experience via a test environment?

• Do they offer onboarding assistance?

• Do they offer training to get you started?

• How long does the setup usually take for a company like yours?

• What customer support do they offer?

• What does their data migration process look like?

Step 5: Discover future innovations

HR tech should be continuously evolving. By assessing if the vendor prioritizes innovation, you can determine if you’re purchasing software that will grow with you — or software that serves a “one-and-done solution” that suits your needs now, but will need to be re-evaluated in the future.

• Do they have a product roadmap aligned per quarter/twice a year?

• Does the CRM have any unique features that other systems don’t?

• How often do they release new features?

Step 6: Run through critical security and performance checks

When you’re handling sensitive candidate information, you need to be sure that it’s secure, and that your company remains compliant with local data protection laws.

• How do you make sure the candidate data you collect is secure?

• Is the vendor able to ensure and manage your company’s compliance with hiring laws?

• Is the vendor compliant with guidelines and policies that your organization must follow, such as GDPR?

Step 7: Evaluate the right solution

The best way to determine what your vendor-client relationship might look like is by reaching out to existing and previous clients. By reaching out to an organization that’s already been through the implementation process, you can ask specific questions that will help you set appropriate expectations.

• Ask the existing client what their implementation process was like: how did it go for them? Did they face any roadblocks?

• Talk to an existing client that has been using the software for at least a year. Have they run into any issues integrating the software? How did their teams handle the transition?

• Reach out to a former client that left within the past year (make sure you confirm the purchase decision). Why did the software solution not work for them?

Step 8: Assemble a cross-functional team

Once you get buy-in from key stakeholders, it’s time to mobilize a dedicated team. Determine who needs to get involved to assist with integration — speak with HR, IT, and HRIS employees and leaders to support you. Reach out to the selected vendor and inquire about a point of contact that can provide guidance while your team goes through this transition. Establish and communicate realistic expectations for your team and create a plan for employee training.

• Are there resources for using and learning about the CRM?

• Does the team need to get certified in using the CRM?

• Who can you contact if you or your team has questions during the implementation process?

• Does your employee training make adoption simple and straightforward?

• Who will be responsible for ensuring seamless adoption of the CRM?

To see Phenom CRM in action, request a personalized demo.