The Challenge

For an organization that’s obsessed with their customers, creating greater ease in processes is a priority, especially when it can be done with agility and speed. So, when multinational technology company Lumen aimed to improve the talent experience for both internal and external candidates, they looked for ways to infuse those qualities of customer obsession into everyday talent acquisition and management processes.

According to Lumen’s Annie Roberts, Talent Acquisition Operations and Marketing Senior Manager, there were three main experiences they wanted to optimize:

Candidate experience. Lumen wanted to create a more customer-like experience for candidates — complete with dynamic, customized content and tailored job recommendations. “Our career site was tough to update; the process was long and expensive,” Roberts recalled.

Recruiter experience. Some “blind spots” existed for recruiters, creating a lack of clarity that made it difficult to collaborate across teams. A lack of data visibility led to disjointed sourcing and networking. “We had very limited above-the-funnel visibility, and we wanted to enable cross-recruiter sharing of talent,” shared Roberts.

Employee experience. Lumen wanted to give employees better visibility into internal opportunities and make their search and apply experience easy and hyper-personalized to improve talent mobility and employee satisfaction.

The Solution

During Lumen’s search for a solution, Phenom stood out as a partner that could help the TA team create a seamless and more customer-focused talent experience. “The idea of a platform that could tie the experience together for candidates, recruiters, and employees was a big draw,” Roberts said.

Initially, Lumen implemented the Phenom Career Site and Phenom CRM, which enabled the team to:

Optimize their career site in real-time. Lumen’s career site is designed for agility, letting the team easily add pages and drop in new content with the Phenom CMS. “We have a very fast-paced ability to make changes and alter pages as we need to,” Roberts said. This includes creating campaign-specific landing pages and consistently updating pages with fresh content, such as videos to showcase job roles.

In fact, the use of video has been a major value-add in helping Lumen stay focused on delivering a modern candidate experience, according to Roberts. “As I think about the way people are consuming content today, and how to make sure we’re getting relevant content out there, the ability to add videos on the fly is great. We’re leaning into it.”

Improve recruiter reach and efficiency. With their Phenom CRM, all candidate data — external and internal — lives in one place. This gives recruiters a single source of data to draw from, improving sourcing and recruiting efficiency. Not only that, its AI pulls in passive leads as well as partial applicants, allowing them to reach high-quality talent they previously couldn’t. “It gives recruiters visibility into candidates above and below the funnel all in one system, something they didn’t have before,” Roberts said.

Drawing on powerful data from the CRM, recruiters can create dynamic lists more easily and automate targeted Phenom Campaigns to candidate subsets with similar attributes. Roberts particularly loves the ability to send text campaigns to candidates using Phenom SMS. “Texting is an important part of meeting candidates where they are, especially for certain roles and segments,” she noted.

In addition, Phenom Chatbot helps Lumen maintain a 24-hour presence to answer candidates’ questions, gives candidates the option to easily apply to personalized jobs, and reveals essential areas of opportunity for career site optimization.

After seeing how their new career site delivered a superior experience for external candidates, Lumen’s TA team wanted the same for internal employees. They added Phenom Talent Marketplace and Phenom Referrals which has helped break through previous internal mobility barriers by:

• Presenting open opportunities to employees based on interests and previous job view and search criteria

• Making it easier for employees to submit and track the status of referrals

“Lumen is a large organization and presenting jobs to employees based on their interests, previous job searches, and skills has been really important,” Roberts emphasized.

The Results

Together, Phenom’s talent acquisition and talent management tools have helped Lumen stay focused on its mission to digitally connect people, data, and applications quickly, securely, and effortlessly. “Culture and transparency are more important than ever. Now we’re able to reinforce that with our talent experience tools,” Roberts said.

In fact, since implementing the talent marketplace, Lumen has been able to fill up to 35% of roles internally, according to Roberts. In addition, they’ve seen notable increases in employee referrals, helping Lumen secure more high-quality talent in a notoriously challenging hiring environment.

An added benefit? Since employees and referrals can easily see where they stand in the hiring process, there are also fewer support tickets hitting the TA team’s queue in search of answers — which means more time can be spent on strategic work instead of routine tasks.

From a recruiter efficiency perspective, having a more targeted approach to talent sourcing thanks to an intelligent CRM is making a big impact. In 2022, 38% of new leads in the CRM came from unique Phenom features and Phenom Campaigns drove over 10% of applies to open positions. “It’s been critical to helping recruiters through a tough market. They’re able to target the right people with the right information and reach out to them quickly,” Roberts noted.

The right information is key. “We needed to develop creative solutions to enable undertakings like salary transparency,” Roberts said, and Phenom has helped Lumen find creative ways to incorporate dynamic salary information into all job postings.

The Future

What’s next for this forward-thinking team? A top priority is implementing Phenom Hiring Manager to give Lumen hiring managers more insight and command throughout the interviewing and hiring process — allowing recruiters to focus on being talent advisors throughout the process.

Other plans include expanding Phenom AI Scheduling, which is currently being piloted. “The Phenom scheduling tool automates our manual scheduling process, saving time and making scheduling easier and faster,” Roberts said.

Phenom Talent Analytics is another capability Lumen TA will leverage further in the coming year. The team currently uses data insights to inform career site updates. “It’s insightful to see what candidates are viewing on the site, with metrics on exit rates and how long they spend on pages,” Roberts said. Next up, they plan to revamp their external career site, using analytics to guide what are sure to be strategic, candidate-obsessed changes.