For years, organizations have talked about moving beyond resumes and credentials to focus on what candidates can actually do. The problem is that most assessment tools weren’t built for this moment. They’re static, generic, and disconnected from the workflows recruiters actually use. The result: hiring teams fall back on gut feel, critical roles stay open too long, and the wrong candidates make it through.
We acquired Be Applied because skills validation can’t be an afterthought. It needs to be embedded in the hiring flow — inline, adaptive, and built for the way enterprises actually hire.
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The urgency around skills isn’t abstract. Research from the World Economic Forum shows that 63% of employers see skills gaps as the biggest barrier to business transformation through 2030. At the same time, AI is rewriting job requirements faster than credentials can keep up. KPMG found that 76% of employers would pay salary premiums up to 15% for candidates with strong AI skills, while 64% have already adjusted their approach to entry-level hiring because of AI capabilities.
Credentials and years of experience don’t tell you if someone can do the job. Skills do. But validating those skills across high-volume hiring, specialized roles, and different industries requires technology that can adapt, not a one-size-fits-all test.
What Applied Brings to Phenom
Applied’s dynamic cognitive assessment technology has been tested across millions of candidates and roles. It adapts to specific job requirements, ensuring that each role is evaluated on the capabilities that actually matter. The result is accurate, scalable skills validation without turning the candidate experience into a time-consuming obstacle course.
As organizations move faster than ever toward skills-first hiring, they need the infrastructure to support it. Applied brings the assessment intelligence and data quality that turn intent into execution, enabling faster, fairer, and more precise talent decisions.
Applied’s technology integrates directly into Phenom’s hiring workflows, so assessments happen naturally, right where candidates are already moving through the process. There’s no redirect to a separate platform or new login to remember. Instead, skills validation becomes part of the experience, not an extra hoop to jump through.
David Perring, Chief Insights Officer at Fosway Group, sees this as addressing an urgent market void: “The shift to skills-based hiring has created a critical gap in how organisations validate talent at enterprise scale. 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.”
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