The Challenge

At DHL Group, opportunities are endless. But until recently, that sentiment wasn’t resonating the way you’d expect for one of the largest logistics companies in the world.

Recruiting for 180,000 positions a year across 220 countries and territories “requires not just visibility but a confident, reputable employer brand,” said Meredith Wellard, VP Group Talent Acquisition, Learning and Growth, at DHL. “We needed a way to showcase how important culture is at DHL and give candidates the option to consume it in a variety of engaging ways.”

At the time, however, the company’s candidate and recruiter experiences were lacking with more than 200 disjointed career sites — most of which had very limited integrations across a multitude of applicant tracking systems. “With so many local career sites, they were fighting each other for exposure. Some never even had a click,” explained Wellard.

This disparate approach inhibited one of their major objectives: establish a cohesive global employer brand with impactful localized content to ultimately fill rolls faster and retain employees longer. “Instead of having to spend a lot of money on millions of potentials to reach our 180,000 hires, we wanted to narrow the pool faster and more accurately…look at less people, but people of higher quality,” said Wellard.

A related challenge? Resonating with knowledge workers. While DHL recruits for a high volume of frontline workers, they also hire for a significant number of specialized roles in technology, engineering, and aviation among others. “The whole world sees us,” said Gail Pantig, VP Talent Acquisition and Employer Branding at DHL. “The impression we leave on all candidates, customers, and employees is vital. If we can’t even unify our employer brand, that doesn’t tell a good story.”

The Solution

The TA team identified the need for a comprehensive solution that would put an unrivaled experience at the center of it all. As luck would have it, DHL’s Express group had recently launched the Phenom Intelligent Talent Experience platform and witnessed early wins, piquing Wellard’s interest. From a product standpoint, Phenom offered key elements she wanted to leverage:

• Career Site, Chatbot, and CMS to host engaging, personalized content, on-demand job recommendations, and faster applications

• CRM to build, engage, and track talent pipelines with AI insights

• Campaigns and Events functionality to streamline talent marketing activities AI Scheduling to automate interview scheduling

• Hiring Manager to reduce feedback loops and streamline collaboration

• Talent Analytics to measure, analyze and optimize performance

Her team followed suit, and consolidation and unification of their career sites and tech stacks began with Phenom HRIS Experience playing a crucial role in integrations to ensure seamless performance of their suite of tools with their five separate ATSs.

“Ease of use was something that was really important to us,” said Pantig, which also made Phenom’s no-code CMS and intuitive drag-and-drop widgets appealing. “The platform is really simple to use for non-technical users,” she elaborated. “You want your team to actually use what you’re buying.”

The Results

What is the impact since implementing Phenom? “It’s similar to trying to remember working before email, or navigating life without a cell phone,” said Pantig. You know it existed, but it’s hard to imagine.” In addition to decreasing their time to hire to just 14 days (40% faster than industry average), success comes in numerous forms:

The Future

DHL is as proud of its forward-thinking vision as it is its impressive history. (The company is more than 500 years old — tracing its roots to the founding of the first modern postal service in 1490.) In Phenom, the company has found a true partner that can help efficiently execute on innovative ideas and a thoroughly modern approach to acquiring and retaining talent.

“Phenom is always unveiling new and surprising market-leading features,” Wellard noted, citing Phenom’s groundbreaking generative AI capabilities, as well as her team’s plans to further leverage various University Recruiting functionalities. “We believe in a balance — using automation when it’s worth doing things that way but preserving human touch where it matters most,” Wellard said.

As talent needs and goals evolve at DHL, both Wellard and Pantig are confident they can handle whatever the future holds, as they themselves evolve from talent administrators to talent experts.

“It’s not only the product, but the support that we’re getting,” shared Pantig. “Phenom doesn’t just implement and leave. They really work with us to maximize our investment and see how it can add continuous value to our organization.”