How Regions Bank is Solving Critical Business Challenges with Recruitment Automation

The Challenge

With a bold mission to “Make Life Better,” Regions Bank — one of the nation’s largest full-service providers of consumer and commercial banking, wealth management and mortgage products and services — is invested in hiring, developing, and retaining the best people for the job.

To deliver, they sought to address two critical priorities:

• Attract, engage, and convert candidates with a new employer persona

• Replace manual processes for high-volume, multi-incumbent roles

Regions rebranded themselves as a more approachable employer to tap into new, diverse talent pools. Having a career site that would support this — and provide candidates with a seamless, personalized experience — was a must. Of equal importance was the ability to replace time-consuming manual processes in a cohesive way, which only a comprehensive talent acquisition strategy and system could support.

The Solution

After researching solutions, the Regions team selected Phenom’s Intelligent Talent Experience platform, confident it would give them the best holistic experience and ROI.

“In addition to avoiding multiple point solutions, we liked the interface, how it worked, and how it felt. We thought our recruiters would be very comfortable operating in the system. It was simple to use and highly customizable for our different workflows,” explained Scott Ewert, Talent Acquisition Senior Manager, Innovation & Strategy at Regions.

Using their Phenom Career Site, CRM, Campaigns, and SMS, the Regions team was able to create and nurture a thriving talent community. This community serves as a way to educate candidates on their refreshed employee value proposition and automate countless hyperpersonalized engagement strategies — including weekly updates on open positions based on their interests, as well incomplete assessment reminders for partial applicants. “Our ability to track conversion based on who’s received these messages is the power behind this,” Ewert noted. “It gives the team the ability to properly engage active and passive talent.”

According to Ewert, automating assessment messages in particular has been a gamechanger for Regions. These messages boost internal efficiency while also facilitating candidate productivity and transparency about their application status. In addition, reaching candidates in real-time through texts or messaging app chats also streamlined recruiter communication about assessments, offer letters, background checks, and start dates in a more efficient yet personable way.

“We consider ourselves talent marketers who are continuously trying to make the candidate journey more meaningful and impactful. Thanks to Phenom, we can deliver,” said Melinda Littleton, Lead Talent Sourcing Partner for Regions.

The Results

“When applicant volume was at an all-time low across the industry, Phenom helped us keep the right talent engaged and convert them into hires instead of losing them to other employers. That was mission-critical,” Ewert said.

With their dynamic, hyper-personalized career site and targeted recruitment marketing efforts, Regions grew their talent community exponentially, adding 8X more candidates. And by easily prequalifying applicants based on whether they passed the company’s required assessment, recruiters are engaging with thousands of best-fit candidates first.

As Regions strives to optimize all of their talent experiences, they’re especially impressed with the increased recruiter productivity the platform affords with intelligent automation. “We’re giving time back to that team,” said Littleton. “They can now focus on higher impact activities like mentoring that support our new hires."'

The Future

Moving forward, the Regions team aims to use their career site to attract candidates beyond those who already know they want to work in banking or financial services. By repurposing existing content from successful campaigns, they plan to launch landing pages that speak directly to different talent pools with tailored content that connects to different job categories. “That’s where we can tell our story in a more meaningful way,” said Ewert.

To expand the breadth of their talent community and simplify campus events, the team is exploring Phenom University Recruiting. Also on their radar is Phenom’s hosted apply process, which gives candidates the ability to complete every step of the application without leaving the career site.

“We want to make sure we get the most from our HR tools and investments,” Ewert remarked. “Our experience with Phenom is a perfect example of maximizing what a comprehensive intelligent system is capable of.”