CASE STUDY
How Southwest Created a Great Candidate Experience Through Phenom
1M
New career site visitors26%
Increase in job seekers who say they’d likely apply17%
Increase in people who say they’d likely refer someone to SouthwestThe Challenge
Southwest wanted to fuel their candidate experience with the same momentum as their employee experience — hyper-personalized and engaging. Their existing career site did not provide actionable data in order to optimize their recruitment spend.
Additionally, Southwest hires with three core values in mind: a Warrior Spirit, a Servant’s Heart, and a Fun-LUVing Attitude. Together, these values make up what Southwest refers to as “Living the Southwest Way.” The values are actually expectations and are tied to performance appraisals. This means Southwest employees are required to love their jobs!
Southwest needed to communicate these expectations to prospective employees. Although the company is fortunate to receive hundreds of thousands of applications a year, Southwest wanted to ensure they were attracting the right candidates living by these values. The challenge was showcasing these principles to a broad audience, before ever having the opportunity to talk about them in person with the candidate.
“Southwest has a strong history and employer brand. Phenom helped showcase our story and brand in ways we couldn’t do before the Phenom TXM platform.”
The Solution
By adopting the Phenom Intelligent Talent Experience platform, these challenges were resolved by giving the team the ability to:
Attract the right talent by delivering personalized and interactive career site experiences to tell the Southwest story
Run campaigns to capture passive candidates
Provide actionable insights into the hiring funnel and the source of applicants to help measure ROI
Retain talent and drive employee referrals with Phenom Employee Experience
The Results
Southwest participates in the Talent Board’s CandE Awards every year. The year they amplified their talent acquisition strategy with the Phenom platform, their candidate experience ranked the highest in three key categories: overall experience, likeliness candidates would apply in the future, and likeliness a candidate would refer a connection to work for the company.
Long before they submitted for the CandE Awards, the team witnessed immediate results after implementation. In less than 90 days after going live, Southwest saw significant improvements in their candidate experience and gained valuable benefits and insights into their talent acquisition strategy including:
Ability to mirror the consumer experience on an engaging career site and showcase its award-winning culture and employer brand
Stronger candidate experience survey responses
Robust talent analytics to make well-informed decisions on the channels to allocate recruiting spend
Early platform adoption across TA team
Increased career site conversion rates
Southwest has been the nation’s largest domestic air carrier since 2003. During peak travel seasons, Southwest operates more than 4,000 weekday departures among a network of 99 destinations in the United States and 10 additional countries. Known for its amazing culture and employee experience, Southwest employs more than 58,000 employees to date.
Industry: Airline
Career site: careers.southwestair.com
Headquarters: Dallas, TX
Employees: 58,000
