The 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.

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