The Challenge

With more than 70,000 committed employees serving over 30 countries and jurisdictions, this Fortune 500 company’s talent acquisition team is continuously hiring for a wide range of roles and skill sets. In fact, they placed 20,000 people in new positions last year alone.

But it wasn’t acquiring external talent that was the company’s biggest challenge since they had already invested in tools to improve their candidate and recruiter experiences. The company’s Sr. Director of Enterprise Talent Enablement said that while interviewing an employee for another role, the employee confided they found the open position on LinkedIn versus the company’s internal job board.

After looking into this further, the team discovered that more employees found it easier to find a job outside the company than inside. “I thought: ‘Oh my gosh, we have to fix this,’” they said — especially in light of the transparency, recognition, and growth that employees are looking for today.

In addition to reducing frustration and making it easy for current employees to view and apply to open positions, the company wanted to empower their workforce with actionable ways to learn, develop, and change roles without having to find another employer.

A key part of the process? Skills.

• Understanding what skills they had

• Determining what skills they needed — now and for the future

• Taking that skills data to define career pathing and identify skills gaps for employees who might be a fit for a new project or opportunity

• And helping employees take the steps necessary to make their goals a reality

Like many organizations, the company is moving toward a skills-based organization that prioritizes a lattice of competencies and potential over a linear ladder of job titles. But that’s easier said than done, their Sr. Director of Talent Enablement emphasized, especially for larger enterprises with global complexities. Skills are changing so rapidly that the only way to create and maintain a current and actionable skills ontology is by truly breaking down company-wide silos and a “talent hoarding mentality” with a holistic solution that works for everyone as an enabler.

The Solution

Traditionally in the TA space, recruitment tools are externally focused — and at the time, this was the case for the company as well. Already a Phenom customer, their TA team was already using Phenom Career Site, CRM, and Campaigns for personalization, networking, and outreach to external candidates, “so it was natural evolution for us to then look at their capabilities for employee experience,” said the company’s VP of Talent Acquisition.

Central to the Employee Experience, Phenom Talent Marketplace leverages AI to quickly connect employees with personalized, best-fit internal roles and opportunities for learning, development, and collaboration — all in a central location. “If we’re going to deliver to our customers, to our clients, to our shareholders, we need to be able to cross-pollinate talent, and a talent marketplace is an enabler to do that,” said their Sr. Director of Talent Enablement.

Branded as the “Career Portal”, it empowers their employees to easily browse open positions and also identify what they want their next role to be. Using Phenom Career Pathing, employees can then receive personalized development plans that will help them upskill using an integration with their learning experience platform.

All of the skills information in the employee profile is synchronized between Phenom and their HCM to make sure the employee, their manager, and the HR team are working from a common dataset. This information is also available to the TA team to streamline internal sourcing. “One of the things of tremendous value and what made Phenom an easy choice is having all of our employees’ skills, experiences, and interests in the same database as our external talent. Our recruiters are able to work the same way they’ve been working all along,” said their Sr. Director of Talent Enablement.

The Results

Success with skills comes in stages, so having appropriate KPIs is imperative. The first one that’s critical to everything? Adoption. Since implementing their Talent Marketplace, the company has seen 60% of employees create profiles and:

• Update their skills and interests within the portal

• Signal if they're open to other opportunities within the organization

• Leverage the portal to make referrals

• Receive AI recommendations for learning and career paths

“We now have information about employees that we didn’t have before,” their Sr. Director of Talent Enablement said. That includes approximately 20 skills per employee and almost 43,000 unique skills across the organization. “The data we have now is so much more powerful,” and having the Phenom CRM as a single source of truth makes it easier for everyone, she noted. More than 1,500 career paths were built in less than 10 months — and there’s been a significant uptick in employee engagement with their learning experience platform, in part due to tying its courses to career aspirations.

Increased employee access to open roles has benefited the entire organization by strengthening the company’s skills base and increasing retention. “Combining those skills keeps employees engaged, invigorated, and continuing to grow within the company rather than looking outside,” their VP of TA said.

“Gone are the days of employees posting for a role they’ll never get because they’re just trying to fish and find anything,” she continued. “The AI behind it helps employees find jobs they never would have found before. It’s giving them suggestions on jobs that they may not have all the skills for, but can definitely start the conversations to grow and develop those skills.”

The company also has deeper insight into how factors like employee tenure, experience, and job zone impacts how people use the “Career Portal”. For example:

• 43% have 10-20 years of experience

• 24% have 5-10 years of tenure

• Over 60% are comprised of the same highly skilled workers that are the hardest to replace

In addition, the team was able to see that 117 employee referrals were made per day through Phenom Referrals in 2023. With Phenom, the company has experienced higher quality applicants, a larger percentage of hires from internal moves, increased retention, and more productive talent teams across the board.

What They're Achieving with Phenom:

The Future

Now that the company is successfully leveraging the Phenom skills ontology to identify roles, skills, and progressions in their organization and make relevant recommendations for career paths, learning courses, and open positions, they’re looking at Phenom Automated Interview Scheduling to bring even greater efficiency to their interview experience.

Their VP of TA added: “The world is changing. We’re on the horizon of not being able to continue unless we’re willing to implement new tools that are skills forward and employee centric. Phenom will hold our hands through that.”