Meet the 2024 Talent Experience Award Winners

Congratulations are in order for the world’s biggest trailblazers who are hiring faster, developing better, and retaining longer — and using the Phenom platform to make it happen.

The Talent Experience Awards recognize innovative organizations that are creating second-to-none experiences for their candidates, employees, recruiters, and hiring teams — and doing it with precision and speed, thanks to intelligence and automation.

Our list of nominees covered national and international brands that are all driving talent experiences forward in their respective industries. With an impressive list of submissions, our board meticulously chose winners that exemplify what it takes to transform candidate and employee journeys into hiring and engagement pipelines built for success. 

The 2024 Talent Experience winners were announced during our Customer Appreciation dinner at IAMPHENOM — the #1 talent experience conference. The winners are Phenom customers and partners across industries, including Retail, Transportation, Healthcare, Manufacturing, Financial Services, Life Sciences, Technology, and Insurance, among others.

Let’s take a look at the success stories of our phenomenal winners:

Land O’Lakes, Inc. — Best of the Best

Committed to advancing technology to solve critical food challenges, Land O’Lakes sought to enhance the candidate experience for interns and hourly hires, increase recruiter efficiency, and improve career site personalization. 

In a separate initiative, their TA, Talent Marketing, and HR Enablement teams were tasked with rolling out a newly created flexible-shifts program at their highest-need manufacturing locations to attract talent in a tight marketplace.

By being able to easily create and market university events, automate the scheduling of interviews, and register and check in attendees faster with a mobile app, Land O’Lakes saved thousands of manual hours, reduced agency spend, and enhanced the candidate experience for interns and hourly hires. 

With increased application conversion rates, the team also hired hundreds of flexible-schedule workers at its U.S. manufacturing sites at a lower cost per hire and with a faster time to fill. The reduction of human hours spent on recruiting by implementing technology-based sourcing and offer processes has been invaluable. Hourly recruiters now receive interview notes within seconds, where previously it would take an hour or more.

Mastercard — Most Innovative Company 

Mastercard wanted an always-on, highly scalable global talent acquisition function that would deliver a modern, ‘consumer-like’ experience to talent prospects and applicants. 

A year into the effort, the company not only elevated its candidate experience with a globally relevant, AI-powered personalized career site, but grew its nurture-ready talent community to over 1M profiles, resulting in a 900% increase in influenced hires. They also experienced 85% faster interview scheduling by using automation to attract, engage and convert quality talent.

Blackbaud — Best Use of Talent Experience for Talent Acquisition

Committed to fueling the impact of its digital-first teams, Blackbaud aimed to enhance its candidate experience, effectively communicate its EVP, optimize the interview process, and create operational efficiencies for recruiters and hiring teams. 

Being able to consistently measure and report on applicant traffic and other metrics was a must. So, too, was the ability to proactively grow and nurture talent pipelines with candidates possessing in-demand skills and ensure timely personalized follow-up. 

Leveraging industry-leading practices like inclusive one-way interviewing with integrated workflow automation — and using robust talent analytics to consistently measure and report the full candidate journey — Blackbaud improved both conversion rates and retention rates with a candidate experience that lets job seekers apply in less than 3 clicks. 

As a result, Blackbaud secured a diverse pipeline of talent, increased job seeker satisfaction, and elicited brand fans who are willing to share their convenient, transparent interview experiences on Glassdoor reviews.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) — Best Use of Talent Experience for Talent Acquisition

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) witnessed significant improvements in their TA processes using a range of Phenom tools that make it easier and faster for job seekers to learn about the brand and apply. 

With a user-friendly hosted apply process, they reduced application time from 15-25 minutes to just 5 minutes. The phenomenal candidate experience they created attracted 3.4M visits and a 145% increase in job seekers. And a strong employer brand and effective SEO strategies led to a 66% increase in apply clicks, a 100% increase in applications and a 200% increase in talent community sign-ups for personalized engagement. 

Thermo Fisher Scientific — Best Use of Talent Experience for Talent Management   

Rapid growth created a ripe opportunity for Thermo Fisher Scientific to differentiate its employee experience and accelerate employee development. They wanted to offer developmental experiences to position employees for the next step in their careers and re-engage them with developmentally focused content. More specifically, they aimed to fill 40% of roles internally, diversify their candidate pipeline, and help talent management grow and retain employees.

Leveraging their internal talent marketplace with personalized job and learning recommendations, peer-to-peer networking, and targeted career development content and campaigns — plus a bi-directional employee profile sync API between their ATS and Phenom — Thermo Fisher markedly improved their employee experience and internal sourcing capabilities. They exceeded their overall internal hiring goal of 40% last year and closed the year with a 46% internal hiring rate in December. 

Truist Financial — Best Use of Talent Experience for Talent Management

Truist Financial desired a holistic talent solution prioritizing an exceptional experience for all involved parties in the talent selection process, including internal and external candidates, recruiters, coordinators, and hiring teams. They sought a partner who not only understood their needs but actively contributed to identifying solutions and shared in their journey toward success through continuous innovation and long-term progression of their goals — particularly when it came to internal mobility.

Having invested in Phenom’s Recruiter, Candidate, Employee and HR Experiences, Truist witnessed expedited growth of external and internal talent pools, benchmark-exceeding application completion rates at/above 83%, and a modern internal and external candidate journey that aligns with their teammate value proposition in just about a year. 

They established a simplified, effective, end-to-end technology infrastructure, including the recent launch of their internal talent marketplace known as Truist’s Career Discovery Hub. In one quarter, Truist saw nearly half its teammate community visit the site, with over 3,000 employees adding 70,000 skills — collectively encompassing over 9,000 unique skills. The Hub is empowering teammates to take meaningful action on career plans, serving up skills-based insights on job descriptions, career paths, open roles, mentoring connections and more. 

Leveraging Phenom workforce intelligence and employee relationship management architecture — combined with enterprise skills framework integrations with the existing human capital management system — Truist has quickly established a strong foundation for innovative, intelligent, adaptive enablement for teammate career mobility.

Bon Secours Mercy Health — Collaborative Champion

As a major U.S. Catholic health system and the largest not-for-profit healthcare provider in Ireland, Bon Secours Mercy Health (BSMH) is a preeminent employer in the communities it serves, handling about 20,000 external hires a year. 

But it isn’t immune to the factors impacting the healthcare industry for years, which only worsened during the pandemic — including staffing shortages, unsustainable cost of labor, unstable supply of people to fill high-demand roles, and climbing turnover rates. They wanted to provide a frictionless talent experience, establish healthy candidate pipelines with high-quality candidates, and improve team productivity with AI and automation.

With solutions including a personalized career site and conversational chatbot, new talent CRM and high-volume hiring solution, BSMH transformed their recruitment process into a personalized, efficient and seamless experience for job seekers. 

Their candidates can now easily find and apply for tailored opportunities, receive customized job alerts and access 24/7 assistance. As a result, Bon Secours is differentiating itself in a crowded market, especially among sought-after candidates like registered nurses and other priority clinical roles. Since implementing Phenom, they have experienced year-over-year growth in overall hires, nursing hires, and early graduate hires.

Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany — Rookie of the Year

By leveraging AI-based candidate matching and introducing an external Talent Zone with over 20,000 registrations to date, Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany is elevating talent acquisition to the next level and expanding access to talent.

Additionally, the multinational organization worked to incorporate an internal talent marketplace with AI-based matching for internal jobs, learning and mentoring — which launched in record time to a subset of their employees. These transformative solutions are propelling Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany’s journey to be future ready.

TD SYNNEX — Rookie of the Year

TD SYNNEX had comprehensive goals centered around enhancing its talent acquisition processes and bolstering employer branding. Its objectives included enhancing the candidate experience with a modern career site, streamlining the application process to improve conversion rates, implementing advanced personalization features for better engagement, and enabling data-driven decision-making by leveraging analytics and reporting tools.

Just a few months after going live with Phenom, TD SYNNEX successfully transformed its candidate experience, resulting in increased engagement and satisfaction. 

Monthly visits from job seekers are up sharply, while personalization features — combined with an intuitive application process — created more leads and applications. Automated interview scheduling reduced their time to schedule interviews by 68%, and talent analytics enabled real-time data-driven decision-making to further boost engagement and attract top talent.

HUGO BOSS — Masters of Learning

Determined to win over younger consumers and talent, the German fashion company launched a bold new approach to their candidate experience with conversational AI. 

HUGO BOSS streamlined the application process for internal and external job seekers, delivered personalized communication and innovative one-way interviews and quickly began identifying the tech-driven, creative talent they needed with AI-assisted sourcing, screening and engagement processes. Key successes include a 36% decrease in time to hire, 79% decrease in time to apply, 300% increase in time spent on the site, and 39,000 chatbot-generated leads and apply clicks.

Regions — Masters of Learning

Regions wanted to maximize their use of Phenom solutions — including their CRM, campaign strategies, automations, and talent marketplace — to create better talent experience outcomes for their candidates, recruiters, and employees. A key focus for the team was developing broader expertise and adoption of the platform by working with cross-functional Phenom teams and developing more peer-based connections with other customers. 

By broadening their platform expertise and fostering the adoption of solutions, Regions created recruiter efficiencies that resulted in impressive talent pool surges — including a 106% increase to their alumni network, a 188% increase to their emerging talent program, and a 72% increase in new CRM profiles created overall. 

They also successfully improved their application experience and conversion; optimized employer branding content; refined talent marketing campaigns through personas; automated talent pools for targeted sourcing and engagement; and increased engagement with internal career development resources.

The Cigna Group — Change Maker

The Cigna Group’s year was defined by numerous strategic focuses to innovate their talent management and recruitment strategies — and to maximize recruiter understanding and usage of the Phenom platform overall. In addition to implementing Phenom Career Pathing to enable internal mobility with personalized career growth opportunities, the company sought an automated interview scheduling tool to enhance the experience and efficiency of the screening and scheduling process. 

At the same time, an organizational-wide rebrand also required extensive updates across its entire Phenom ecosystem and appropriate communication to internal and external candidates.

The Cigna Group’s multifaceted use of innovative talent management and recruitment strategies to foster impactful experiences highlights the value one unified system can have across cross-functional teams. Using their talent marketplace and career pathing, the team witnessed 37% hires from internal moves, more than 1500 career paths built by employees in less than 10 months, a significant increase in overall learning activity, and increased retention. 

A dedicated effort to maximize recruiter platform usage also led to outstanding efficiency improvements, including a 1697% increase in matching criteria set and a 6377% increase in CRM matches added. In addition, automated interview scheduling reduced their time to schedule from over three days to just a few hours.

In just two months, the team also led an extensive rebrand across their external and internal career sites, and CRM, which contributed to the overall success of the company’s rebranding efforts. 

Stanford Health Care — Change Maker

The goal at Stanford Health Care is to give every candidate the attention they deserve for showing an interest and taking the time to apply. Ideally, this interaction is in the form of a career conversation — guiding candidates toward current openings or helping them develop the skills needed to qualify for their desired role in the future through continuous check-ins. 

The company also wanted to decrease overall vacancies and aging requisitions, increase their talent pool, decrease reliance on outside labor utilization, and reduce time to offer.

Using Phenom to reduce administrative burden and facilitate communication, the team conducted 2,856 ‘career chats’ last year, reduced their days to offer by 41 days, re-engaged with former applicants to fuel immediate pipeline increases, and hosted engaging internal mobility career events. 

By reviewing the ROI on each recruitment vendor partnership and making adjustments to their operations, the team redirected the money saved toward their candidate care engagement program.

SAP SuccessFactors — Best Technology Partner

Over 50 mutual customers benefit from exceptional talent experiences and seamless data connectivity thanks to SAP SuccessFactors and Phenom’s trusted partnership. With SAP and Phenom, organizations can deliver engaging candidate experiences, effectively engage and convert applicants and leads, and transform how to attract, identify, and hire the right talent using AI and automation.

QuantumWork Advisory — Best System Integrator Partner

QuantumWork Advisory (QWA) has successfully implemented over 20 global Phenom customers since 2021. With an outstanding customer satisfaction rating in their global portfolio, QWA has exhibited collaboration, determination, expertise in Phenom technology, and a go-to-market strategy that allows for improved user adoption and long-term client retention.

talentEXP — Best System Integrator Partner

With proficiency in every aspect of the Intelligent Talent Experience platform, talentEXP’s deep knowledge stems from implementing nearly 100 Phenom customers since 2017. Their commitment to excellence is exemplified by consistent top customer satisfaction scores and innovative consulting services for strategic advisory and talent operations optimization to ensure clients maximize the platform across all use cases.

Congratulations to Our 2024 Talent Experience Award Winners

“The Talent Experience Awards are a testament to the incredible progress forward-thinking organizations continue to make as they hire, develop, and retain employees with the transformative power of AI and automation,” said Christina Brown, Vice President, Global Customer Value at Phenom. “The efficiencies they're attaining and unparalleled experiences they’re providing sets a benchmark for the entire HR industry.”

Thank you to all our amazing nominees, and congratulations to this year’s winners! Nominations for the 2025 Talent Experience Awards will open up this summer.

Explore more customer success stories and case studies here.