Phenom Acquires Plum To Validate the Durable Skills AI Can’t Replace and Resumes Can’t Verify

As AI makes general intelligence a commodity, human skills have never mattered more. Yet most hiring processes still rely on resumes and gut instinct to assess them. It’s a flawed approach that costs companies up to 30% of an employee's first-year salary when it's wrong.

Enter Plum, our latest acquisition. 

Plum is a pioneer in psychometric-based talent assessments, and together we're scaling role-specific behavioral assessments to validate the durable skills AI can't replace and resumes can't verify. Combined with our agentic delivery and Hypercell context, enterprises can now assess the human qualities (empathy, judgment, resilience, and more) that determine success for any role, in any market at scale.

Why Behavioral Assessment Has Stayed on the Sidelines

Psychometric science has existed for decades. Organizations have known for a long time that measuring personality, cognitive style, and behavioral traits leads to better hiring decisions. So why hasn't it scaled?

The short answer is complexity. Building and maintaining scientifically validated assessments for every role, calibrated for every industry and market, requires significant resources most hiring teams don't have. And even when organizations invest in assessments, they typically live in a separate system, which means another login, another handoff, and another place for candidates to drop off. 

The pressure to solve this has also never been greater. By 2028, Gartner estimates that one in four job candidate profiles worldwide will be fake. Phenom customers are already feeling it, reporting a 50-200% rise in poser candidates over the last year alone. Complexity aside, the tools used to screen candidates simply haven't kept pace with how fast the candidate pool itself has changed. That disconnect is what we're fixing.

What Plum Brings to Phenom

Plum is built on the premise that every person has untapped potential, and that predicting fit requires more than a job history. Its proprietary Role Model™ technology maps behavioral blueprints against more than 40,000+ real-world jobs, delivering scientifically validated predictions of on-the-job performance with accuracy proven four times greater than resume screening alone.

Where traditional assessments measure surface-level qualifications, Plum's psychometric models validate the durable skills that determine whether someone will actually succeed in a role: emotional intelligence, adaptability, sound judgment, and resilience. These aren't traits that appear on a resume or surface in a 30-minute interview. They're the capabilities that separate consistent high performers from candidates who only looked right on paper. 

The acquisition builds on Phenom’s I/O practice to deliver inline behavioral and situational judgment assessments, while adding the dimension that has historically been the hardest to capture at scale: the behavioral traits and durable skills that determine whether someone will truly thrive in a role.

"Resume-based screening and basic assessments reveal what candidates have done, but aren't well-suited for identifying leadership potential, adaptability, and learning agility, especially in an era of poor skill signal quality, rapid technological change, and shortening skills shelf-life," said Abhinav Shrivastava, Research Manager, Talent Acquisition and Strategy at IDC. "Integrating skills-based assessment with psychometric science delivers a more robust and reliable skill signal. Phenom's acquisition of Plum, in addition to Be Applied, brings comprehensive assessment capabilities to the market, enabling organizations to surface both existing skills and potential, improving hiring accuracy and decision-making."

Completing the Assessment Stack

The second acquisition in 10 weeks, Plum joins Be Applied (acquired in February) as an anchor in Phenom's strategy to unify candidate assessment and employee development on a single agentic platform. 

Together, they form a full-spectrum assessment stack that validates cognitive, behavioral, and situational capabilities across every candidate and role: what someone can do, how they'll approach the work, and whether their behavioral profile aligns with what success actually requires.

The result is a system of checks rather than a single checkpoint, with each layer building a more complete picture of candidate validation across every stage of the hiring process.

How It Works at Enterprise Scale

The combination of Plum's science with Phenom's Hypercell framework and agentic infrastructure is what makes behavioral assessment viable across an enterprise — not just for select roles or markets, but for every open position, delivered in the flow of the hiring process.

This Hypercell approach takes into account an organization's context, identifying the critical behavioral factors for each role based on industry, function, and geography, and dictates how AI and automation are applied to assessment creation and delivery. The orchestration of this delivery is governed by Phenom WorkOps, which deploys agents like the Assessment Creation Agent to address the time-consuming task of profile creation. By automating conversations with managers and interactions with employees, the agent can rapidly generate behavioral blueprints, making assessments immediately available to hiring automation for inline candidate delivery at enterprise scale.

Organizations can define what success looks like for any role and automatically deploy the right assessments to measure candidate fit, calibrated to the specific demands of their industry, function, and market:

• A healthcare organization hiring patient-facing staff can assess empathy and composure under pressure alongside the clinical skills the role requires, delivered via Voice Assessment Agent over the phone to give nurses the flexibility to engage on their schedule

• A financial services firm recruiting relationship managers can evaluate social intelligence and sound judgment alongside technical qualifications like financial instrument knowledge and portfolio experience, with the Sourcing Agent identifying the strongest external and internal candidates before deploying the AI Interviewer to assess fit through a dynamic avatar-led conversation

• A hospitality company recruiting guest experience managers can assess emotional intelligence, like the ability to read people and maintain composure under difficult situations, alongside operational qualifications, with the Simulation Agent testing how candidates handle a difficult customer or an unexpected situation, augmented by Plum's psychometric science to evaluate behavioral traits across a broader range of interactions

Every assessment is independently audited using large-scale candidate data to detect adverse impact across demographic groups, and designed to meet global data privacy and regulatory standards.

Hiring With More Certainty

Behavioral traits can't be fabricated with a prompt. Durable skills can't be verified by scanning a PDF. And the cost of getting it wrong keeps climbing. But when you hire with the right data to begin with, that intelligence doesn't stop at the offer. Organizations can apply the same intelligence to onboarding, career pathing, succession planning, and manager coaching, turning the traits that predicted success in a role into the foundation for what each employee grows into next.

With Plum's science now part of Phenom's platform, organizations can move beyond screening what candidates claim and start validating who they are — at scale, in real time, and embedded in the workflows their teams already use. We're excited to welcome Plum's team and customers to Phenom as we continue building toward that goal.

Don't let AI-generated candidates slip through the cracks. Register for our upcoming webinar:
Candidate Fraud Detection in the Age of AI: How to Catch What Traditional Hiring Can't

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