Career Pathing - Phenom

About Phenom: Phenom is a global HR technology company with a purpose to help a billion people find the right job. Phenom's guiding purpose was born from our founders' vision and is driven today by our core values. When we say one billion jobs, we mean it.

The Challenge: At Phenom, an HR Tech company, we faced a significant challenge: low employee engagement and high customer churn rates within our Employee Experience suite. Many of the existing features resembled social media functionalities but lacked a compelling value proposition, failing to resonate with employees. Our business goal was to dramatically increase engagement by at least 10x and create upsell and cross-sell opportunities for our existing customers.
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The Vision: To address this, I focused on creating a strategic feature centered around "Career Pathing." Recognizing that employees often seek clarity about their professional growth within a company, I developed a feature that utilized historical HR records and current employee data to recommend optimal career paths. The idea was to provide employees with a personalized career trajectory, emphasizing the skills needed for advancement and making the path to their desired positions clear and actionable.
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Product Execution: The Career Pathing feature assessed employees' skills based on self-assessments, peer evaluations, and manager assessments. It then generated a personalized career path, identifying the necessary skills for progression and suggesting relevant learning opportunities. We also integrated a learning application that enabled employees to acquire certifications in the skills identified, thus increasing their eligibility for promotions. The system was designed to accommodate lateral movement, taking into account each company’s historical culture and internal mobility patterns.
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Technical Implementation: Implementing Career Pathing required managing substantial data sets and complex relationships between roles, skills, and career paths. Drawing on my experience with GraphDB (Neo4j), I led the migration of our data to this platform, enabling us to establish the necessary connections seamlessly. This migration not only enhanced the efficiency of multiple features but also resulted in a 20% reduction in infrastructure costs. Moreover, the adoption of GraphDB allowed us to introduce 50 new machine-learning-based features without incurring additional costs, significantly expanding the capabilities of our product suite.
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Pilot and Validation: We validated our approach through a pilot program with two enterprise clients, Kühne + Nagel and Southwest Airlines. We provided our Employee Experience product free for a year, working closely with these partners to refine and perfect the Career Pathing feature. The pilot was a success, and we eventually onboarded over 140 enterprise customers, including Microsoft, Cognizant, and Hilton Hotels, before I left the organization.
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Impact and Success: The results were substantial. Within six months, we achieved a 10x increase in engagement metrics and successfully mitigated customer churn within the Employee Experience suite. The migration to GraphDB not only streamlined our infrastructure but also created a robust foundation for future innovation. This initiative addressed critical challenges in the HR Tech industry, enhancing employee engagement, optimizing data utilization, and positioning Phenom for continued growth and innovation.

More about Career Pathing here.