HRTech Interview with John Deal, Senior Director of Product Marketing at Phenom

John Deal, Senior Director of Product Marketing at Phenom chats about some of their technology’s latest enhancements and how their latest acquisition of Tydy will lead to better HRTech capabilities across the Phenom Platform:

_________

Hi John, tell us about yourself and your learnings being in HRTech.

My five years in the HR space has been primarily dedicated to the employee experience. Many companies struggle to create personalized relationships with their employees that set them up for professional success — making them feel valued and that the organization cares about their career. Organizations’ onboarding procedures often take a “one-size-fits-all” approach. Personalization at scale from offer acceptance is an imperative to get people engaged from day one.

We’d love to hear more about the Tydy acquisition and how it will impact the Phenom platform’s road map down the line?

The Tydy acquisition expands the Phenom platform to seamlessly onboard employees — enabling hiring managers, HR, Operations, and HRIT teams to build a flawless experience for new employees from offer to productivity.

Now with onboarding, the Phenom platform bridges the connection between candidates and employees to create a phenomenal end-to-end talent experience from job discovery until the moment an employee is offboarded from an organization. This streamlined experience simplifies the way organizations achieve compliance with regulations, and solves a crucial need for talent acquisition and talent management teams to complete necessary operational steps, verifications, and documentation leading up to an employee’s first day — which traditionally occurs across disparate systems. This shortens time to productivity while creating a fast, transparent and easy experience for new hires that makes a lasting positive impact.

Phenom is rapidly building preboarding, onboarding and offboarding technology into our Intelligent Talent Experience platform, integrating Tydy’s Employee Data Platform with ours to create a unified profile for candidates as they become employees. This will allow for next-level personalization and create more seamless experiences — from the first time a candidate lands on a career site through the hiring process, to after they become an employee and later advance their career. This unification of data will also make it easier to follow a new hire’s journey and maintain compliance, even if their company is globally distributed.

Catch more HRTech Insights: HRTech Interview with Debra Squyres, Chief Customer Officer at Bonusly

What are some of the biggest challenges that brand’s still face when it comes to employee onboarding protocols? Can you talk about the most impactful onboarding experiences you’ve seen leading brands follow in SaaS and what takeaways others should grab from them?

Most onboarding experiences are overly focused on automation and don’t provide an experience that drives engagement. As a result, employees often fail to become productive and start making an impact to the organization quickly.

Phenom customers, for example, were experiencing costly delays when preboarding and onboarding new employees. In one instance, a logistics company was losing a billion dollars per year because it didn’t have the correct size uniforms to give employees on their first day.

With the acquisition of Tydy, Phenom will bring personalization to the onboarding process in a more thoughtful way, while also mixing in automation to help the experience scale.

Why is it becoming more crucial for HR-IT-Ops teams to have better and more unified platforms that can keep data integrated to avoid silos?

The silos have to come down for people and data to move seamlessly through departments. By integrating data through one system, organizations can avoid costly errors, and avoid communication issues that can have an adverse impact on onboarding experiences.

Case in point: employees make their decision to stay at an organization in the first 90 days — and just like that Head & Shoulders commercial said, you never get a second chance to make a first impression. In perhaps the most competitive market ever for talent, it’s crucial for companies to make sure they nail that first impression, starting from offer acceptance with preboarding, and rolling their new hire right into a memorable onboarding experience.

Because it can take time to find the right hire, there is also pressure to make new employees productive as fast as possible. This means onboarding needs to be smooth, but comprehensive. It also means personalization is paramount to making sure the employee is prepared with the right information needed for their specific job. This is only possible at scale through automation and AI, and to do that effectively, you need a unified, standardized dataset.

For organizations looking to improve their HR tech processes and alignment, what top tips would you share?

Make sure you’re vetting your potential technology partners on their integration strategy and support, as well as the quality of their data standardization. There is a delicate balance that needs to be struck between core systems and experience systems, but it’s a necessity to attract the best talent. Organizations need to be diligent about choosing a vendor with experience not only in integrating systems, but also in creating data consistency to power a meaningful experience.

The best technology partners will also have well thought out change management programs that cover not only their product, but the intersection of that product with other parts of the tech stack. This doesn’t mean rigid, waterfall project plans, but more agile programs that cater to the personas and learning types involved in a deployment. It should also include the flexibility to let you run with the resources or have the partner run the program for you.

Can you comment on the future of AI and HR Tech: the biggest impact that industry users should look out for?

Next-level generative AI technology — specifically AI agents purpose-built for HR will support every aspect of the talent lifecycle: helping candidates find the right jobs, helping recruiters find the right candidates, guiding employees on their career journeys, and improving managers’ ability to support their employees’ growth. Ideally, these are built into the flow of work to drive better adoption so users don’t have to switch quickly between tasks and begin to see them as a natural extension of their daily tasks. In our case, this will also extend to preboarding and onboarding to further assist new hires.

The proliferation of skills as a baseline for talent planning and assessment is necessary to give companies the most flexibility. As companies figure out how to leverage the latest technology to rapidly generate the job architectures they need and create a robust validation framework, the analysis paralysis should break — we’ll start to see more companies starting their journey towards skills-based planning, hiring, and development.

Read More on Hrtech : HRTech Interview with Laura Baldwin, President at O’Reilly    

[To share your insights with us, please write to psen@itechseries.com ]