The Challenge

Global insurer and financial service provider AXA prioritizes innovation and forward human progress. And they give more than lip service when it comes to making positive change for their people by offering stimulating career opportunities within and across different functions and countries.

A few years ago, however, their talent acquisition (TA) team identified the need to streamline processes and provide an unrivaled talent experience. Easier said than done.

The company embodies characteristics inherent to a global organization with a presence in 50 countries: AXA is multi-language, multi-business, and has a decentralized structure. They also must adhere to industry-specific compliance and security standards.

They looked for a solution provider that could serve as a true collaborative partner in creating a talent experience that matched company goals and values, while staying aligned with the nature of AXA’s decentralized business model. Critical to the decision? Being able to fill a large percentage of their vacancies with internal employees.

The Solution

Recognizing a market leader that could navigate the company’s unique complexities, AXA chose Phenom and its Intelligent Talent Experience platform to realize their goals.

AXA implemented Phenom’s Employee, Candidate, and Recruiter Experiences, focusing their first efforts on:

• Phenom Talent Marketplace for internal mobility

• Phenom Career Site for a better candidate experience

• Phenom CRM-empowered activities for optimized recruiter efficiency

The Results

According to Fanny Deconinck, AXA’s Global Head of Talent Attraction and Employer Branding, their collaboration with Phenom is empowering the AXA teams to modernize the experience today — and scale to meet tomorrow’s talent acquisition and management goals.

AXA chose to roll out their new internal talent marketplace in waves, starting with 30,000 employees (about 30% of the workforce) to gain key learnings. Deconinck attributes strong adoption rates partly to the cross-functional approach they took to implementation. The project team engaged stakeholders not only from HR and recruitment, but also from communication, brand, and security teams. “Anyone who would have something to say at any point,” she said.

“We’ve gotten great feedback,” revealed Deconinck. “Employees feel like we’re truly investing in them — which we are.”

By improving the experience and reducing the time to apply in half for both external and internal candidates, AXA has seen 13X more apply clicks and received 11X more external and internal applications.

Deconinck cited additional noticeable areas of improvement since launching Phenom, including:

• Increased career site and talent marketplace traffic

• More CRM leads from internal and external talent

• A modernized experience that candidates and employees love

• Robust analytics

Commenting on Phenom Talent Analytics, Deconinck called out the invaluable benefit of being able to track candidate interactions and site visitor behaviors to measure the success of recruiting efforts. “With our legacy system, it was like a black box — we couldn’t track anything,” she said.

Also key so far? The Phenom platform has allowed the TA team to grow its recruitment marketing efforts, content creation, and social media outreach. “It’s amazing what we’ve been able to do,” Deconinck said. “Our previous career site had 30 visits per month. After one campaign, we’ve had 137 visits in five days. It’s like night and day.”

The Future

In addition to strengthening application conversion with analytics data, AXA plans to next leverage Phenom to achieve the following three goals:

1. Level up career pathing
   AXA plans to design an even more robust employee experience to help their workforce grow and develop. Building on their talent marketplace, they’ll explore Phenom Career Pathing, Gigs, and Mentoring so employees can better plan and actualize their professional future, while talent teams have more visibility to empower them.

2. Design compelling job description pages
   Moving forward, AXA is excited to leverage their Phenom CMS to add employee testimonials, more user-generated content, and video to bring their job descriptions to life.

3. Elevate inclusive recruiting
   Leveraging analytics and Phenom AI Insights, AXA hopes to promote more inclusive candidate sourcing and selection to support diversity hiring goals.