Phenom, the leader in applied AI that helps organizations hire faster, develop better and retain longer, today announced the acquisition of Be Applied, an AI‑driven cognitive assessment solution that validates candidate and employee capabilities at scale. By combining Phenom’s AI with Be Applied’s evidence‑based assessments, enterprises can confidently move to skills‑first hiring without sacrificing speed, quality or fairness.
Talent Gaps and AI Drive the Shift to Skills-Based Hiring
The shift to skills-based hiring is accelerating as organizations navigate rapid workforce transformation. Research from the World Economic Forum shows that 63% of employers now see skills gaps as the biggest barrier to business transformation between 2025 and 2030. Companies are redesigning talent strategies around skills to stay ahead of changing business conditions, rising competition, and persistent talent shortages.
At the same time, AI is reshaping what “qualified” means. KPMG’s Q4 2025 AI Pulse Survey found that employers would pay salary premiums of up to 15% for candidates with strong AI skills. The survey also reported that 64% of organizations have adjusted their approach to entry-level hiring due to AI capabilities, while 41% have adjusted strategies for experienced workers. Skills and real-world capabilities, not credentials alone, are quickly becoming the currency of hiring.
Traditional Assessments Can’t Keep Up
Most assessment tools weren’t built for skills-first hiring at enterprise scale. They are static, generic, and disconnected from real job requirements, with limited support for different industries, role types, and proficiency levels. The result: critical roles stay open too long, the wrong candidates make it through, and hiring teams fall back on resumes and gut feel.
The cost of getting it wrong is significant. The US Department of Labor estimates that a bad hire can cost at least 30% of that employee’s first-year salary, before accounting for lost productivity, manager time, and team impact.
Applied Brings Adaptive, Evidence-Based Skills Validation
Applied’s proprietary cognitive assessment technology adapts to specific job requirements across industries and experience levels, ensuring each role is evaluated on the capabilities that actually matter. Tested across millions of candidates and roles, the platform delivers accurate, scalable skills validation without sacrificing candidate experience.
Evidence shows that skills-based assessments significantly reduce hiring mistakes: recent research indicates that roughly 90% of employers using skills tests report a reduction in mis-hire rates. With Applied, these insights are now natively embedded into Phenom’s AI platform, transforming skills-based hiring from aspiration into an operational reality.
What the Acquisition Adds to Phenom
The acquisition supercharges Phenom’s industry-specific AI agents for skills-based hiring by adding new cognitive assessment capabilities on top of existing behavioral, situational judgement and language assessment capabilities. These are delivered inline with the application experience, driving higher completion rates and enabling faster, more confident hiring decisions. Enhanced industrial-organizational science capabilities ensure assessments are scientifically validated, fair, and defensible, helping enterprises avoid costly mis-hires and wasted recruiting cycles.
Organizations can design, control, and customize assessments to match specific industry, role, and enterprise needs. Hiring teams can then review results in real time to accelerate screening and shortlists, giving every interviewer a centralized view of validated skills for each candidate.
Because the same assessments can be used to validate employee skills, organizations can reuse them for more accurate skills mapping and gap analysis, gaining a richer, real-time view of their skills supply. Integrated with Phenom’s omnichannel delivery, the technology works across email, text, and chatbot, giving recruiters, managers, candidates, and employees flexible, consumer-grade experiences without adding complexity.
Together, these capabilities create a unified skills-first journey across the entire talent lifecycle: from sourcing to screening to hire to employee growth.
Leadership and Analyst Perspectives
“Organizations are moving faster than ever at applying skills to hiring, and they need the infrastructure to support it,” said Mahe Bayireddi, CEO and co-founder of Phenom. “Skills assessment agents are essential, and Applied brings the assessment intelligence and data quality that turn intent into execution, so our customers can make faster, fairer, and more precise talent decisions.”
“The shift to skills-based hiring has created a critical gap in how organisations validate talent at enterprise scale,” said David Perring, Chief Insights Officer at Fosway Group. “Phenom’s acquisition of Applied is the next logical step in their agentic product roadmap. It directly addresses that gap, and in so doing broadens their customers’ talent pool, surfaces real potential, helps remove bias and accelerates the hiring process.”
“We’ve spent years working with customers to solve the critical challenge of skills validation,” said Khyati Sundaram, CEO & Chair of Applied. “Joining Phenom means we can help more organizations hire the right people faster and with confidence. Together, we can make skill-based hiring a reality at scale.”
Attend IAMPHENOM March 10-12 at the Pennsylvania Convention Center in Philadelphia to dive deeper into how Phenom is helping organizations hire faster, develop better and retain longer using AI, automation and experience. Register before February 28 and save 25% with Go Birds pricing.
With Phenom, candidates find and choose the right job faster, employees develop their skills and evolve, recruiters become wildly productive, talent marketers engage with extreme efficiency, talent leaders optimize hiring and onboarding processes, managers build stronger-performing teams, HR aligns employee development with company goals, and HRIT easily integrates existing HR tech to create a holistic infrastructure.
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