The Challenge

In the face of rapid company growth, a changing workforce, and unprecedented market challenges, the talent acquisition team at Mastercard needed to revamp its talent acquisition strategies. Tools and technology utilized by the team were not meeting their current needs; content and processes were providing disparate experiences for candidates and hiring managers; and the pace of the marketplace had created unforeseen challenges and administrative burden due to the sheer volume on the applicant system.

“Mastercard was growing at never-before-seen levels — all while navigating through the ‘great resignation’ and the tech industry-wide ‘war for talent,’” shared Kerry Royer, SVP, head of Global Talent Acquisition. “At Mastercard, a strong part of our culture is an intense focus on our customer — to build and partner on solutions that keep the customer, or end user, at the center of everything we do. When looking at our situation from the candidates’ perspective, we lacked some of the infrastructure and technological solutions to deliver processes and experiences for them that could be considered best-in-class.”

Additionally, Bejoy Mathew, Vice President Software Engineering, Employee Digital Experience shared some of the challenges faced with disparate experiences: “Mastercard’s global career site ecosystem consisted of over 100 regional pages and multiple experiences — none of which connected to our talent CRM. We saw an opportunity to thoughtfully combine and elevate that overall experience,” he added.

And finally, due to significant hiring volume, there was administrative burden on the system, including a manual interview scheduling process. The team was concerned with losing candidates to the competitive job market due to administrative issues like delays in interview scheduling.

Overall, the team was faced with the inherent challenges that come with rapid growth — including operational inefficiencies. This necessitated a comprehensive solution to align the organization’s recruitment marketing and talent sourcing efforts with its overall people and business strategies.

Matthias Leitzmann, head of Global Talent Discovery at Mastercard, shared: “We knew we were at a pivotal moment to secure a solution that utilized the latest technology, offered enhanced capabilities to meet current and future needs, and ultimately provide an improved, seamless experience for our candidates, recruiters, and hiring managers. We knew where we wanted to go and what we wanted that experience to be, but we also needed a solution that would allow us to get better very quickly while giving us plenty of room to grow in the future.”

The Solution

With the overarching goal to transform to a more seamless experience for both candidates and internal team members, Mastercard partnered with Phenom to bring their vision to life. Phenom’s Intelligent Talent Experience platform — including Career Site and campaign-builder features — were the primary differentiators for the team, given the current challenges they were facing.

The team shared the challenges of their current career site, including no real-time connection to a CRM database, inabilities to make quick content edits across over 100 regional career site pages, and different candidate experiences across global markets.

“We knew we needed a partner that was focused on creating a great user experience, while also providing consistency and efficiency for our internal processes. This meant connecting the career site to the application process and the CRM, giving us the data to understand the end-to-end candidate experience,” explained Royer.

Phenom Campaigns has also supported Mastercard’s “always on” hiring model. The team continuously engages job seekers who opt to be part of the Mastercard talent community, both for current and future opportunities, via targeted, multitouchpoint recruitment marketing campaigns. This helps them maintain an engaged pipeline of qualified talent to quickly meet their business needs.

This proactive approach is aiding their high-volume hiring efforts, especially now that they’ve rolled out Phenom AI Scheduling to expedite this previously time-consuming, mostly manual task.

Another key aspect of this partnership was being able to work with a team that was operating an agile model that they could scale up or down as needed, while keeping the human at the center of their hiring processes.

“A key tenet of how we work at Mastercard is building scalable solutions. In this case, we needed to leverage technology to reduce friction, like in interview scheduling and consolidating our global careers site — and find a partner that could meet our agile way of working, given the ebbs and flows in the talent marketplace,” Royer shared.

The Results

One year into their partnership with Phenom, and Mastercard is starting to see promising improvements in end user experience, especially when it comes to elevating the job seeker experience. Furthermore, Recruitment Marketing as well as Talent Sourcing Specialists are benefiting from lead conversion efficiencies and are realizing savings through economies of scale.

The team has been better able to attract, engage, and convert more talent, reaping both short- and long-term benefits. Before where they were seeing two-thirds of visitors to their jobs search page drop off, job seekers are now interacting on Mastercard’s career site longer and applying at greater frequency with help from the new, globally-relevant career site.

Leitzmann shared, “From a talent scouting perspective, generating more leads puts us in a better position to build a better team. And with better engagement with our candidates, we’re able to keep connected with these leads in the future, building a strong pipeline of interested candidates. It’s been a robust way for us to extend our investment into longer-term wins.”

Automated interview scheduling has also proven to be a significant improvement for both the prospective hires and the internal team at Mastercard. In addition to scheduling well over 5,000 interviews, 88% of them were scheduled within 24 hours of the request.

“We’ve reduced the time it takes to schedule an interview by more than 85%,” shared Leitzmann. “This efficiency not only improves the candidate experience but is streamlining internal processes, reducing administrative burden, and helps us more efficiently land great talent.”

Phenom Talent Analytics are also helping Mastercard quantify the impact of its new strategies and processes. “Data has been providing us with insights that are then driving our actions. We’ve received invaluable aggregated insights into the full candidate journey — how candidates come to our site, how they interact with our careers site, and other important insights. All of these measures help us understand our candidates, which helps us take action and engage with this community more effectively, and ultimately this helps us turn applications into hires,” explained Leitzmann.

With over 900K members that opted into their talent community, Mastercard now has access to a robust, continually growing talent pipeline — numbers that are poised to keep growing with their new-found efficiencies. “In fact, this has contributed to over 2,000 influenced hires in 2023 — talent that was exposed to one or several recruitment marketing and talent sourcing campaigns, and subsequently decided to join Mastercard,” shared Leitzmann.

While scale, reach, reduced bounce rates, improved conversions, and more influenced hires are core components to Mastercard’s success, the overarching aim is to achieve a best-in-class candidate experience and a high level of candidate quality. “One of the pillars of our People strategy is to be best-in-class in talent attraction,” said Royer. “We know that our people drive our business, strategy, and customer success. With the right people, we can continue fueling Mastercard’s success — and Phenom can help us get there.”

Together with Phenom, they're achieving:

• 900%

  more candidate profiles

• 141,000

  more leads compared to industry average

• 11%

  higher apply conversion rates compared to industry average

• 85%

  faster interview scheduling

The Future

Looking ahead, Mastercard is poised for further growth. Strong demand for the company’s core products, expansion into new products and services, and increasing global reach, will continue to fuel the company’s need for top talent.

How to best and responsibly leverage AI, discover great talent — internally and externally — and further introduce experience-enhancing automations, are all top of mind and will help shape how Mastercard brings its vision of being a place where the best people choose to be to life.

Additionally, the team remains focused on inclusive hiring practices, and continuously listening to, and learning from, the needs of their current and prospective employees.

Besides the work currently underway, Talent Acquisition is looking to continue to explore new Phenom capabilities and features, such as expanding the use case for ATS integrations as well as offering video-based screening options.

Royer shares, “While we are still early in our Phenom journey, seeing Phenom adapt and integrate game-changing features like generative AI quickly yet responsibly for future use cases helps affirm our alignment in objectives and outcomes in our partnership with Phenom.”

As Mastercard’s transformative journey continues, the tight alignment of their talent acquisition goals with broader business strategies will ensure superior experiences, greater efficiencies, and unrivaled quality talent.