.jpg)
Phenom has acquired Be Applied, an AI-driven cognitive assessment platform that validates candidate and employee skills at scale. This acquisition integrates Be Applied’s evidence-based, adaptive assessments into Phenom’s applied AI platform, enabling enterprises to implement true skills-first hiring without compromising speed, quality, fairness, or scalability across high-volume and specialized roles.
Organizations face mounting pressure to close skills gaps amid rapid AI-driven workforce changes and talent shortages. Traditional assessments often fall short—static, generic, and disconnected from actual job demands—leading to prolonged vacancies, mis-hires, and reliance on resumes or intuition. The cost of a bad hire can exceed 30% of an employee’s first-year salary, not including lost productivity or team disruption.
Be Applied’s technology dynamically adjusts assessments to match role-specific requirements, experience levels, and industry contexts. Validated across millions of candidates and roles, it delivers accurate, fair, and defensible results while preserving a positive candidate experience. This evidence-based approach significantly lowers mis-hire risk and supports broader, more diverse talent pools by focusing on capabilities rather than credentials.
The acquisition enhances Phenom’s industry-specific AI agents with cognitive, behavioral, situational judgment, and language assessments. These capabilities appear natively during applications, improving engagement and enabling recruiters to screen faster. Hiring teams gain real-time access to validated skill results, while the same assessments support internal skills inventories and development planning.
Built on industrial-organizational science, the combined solution helps organizations minimize bias, ensure compliance, and defend hiring decisions. It supports enterprise-scale deployment across diverse roles and volumes, aligning with the shift toward skills as the primary hiring currency—especially as employers increasingly value AI proficiency and pay premiums for it (KPMG Q4 2025 AI Pulse Survey).
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
To learn more about Phenom’s acquisition of Applied, visit the Phenom blog. Book a demo to experience Phenom Applied AI in action.
About Phenom
Phenom is an applied AI company with the only AI infrastructure built specifically for HR. Powered by Engines that harmonize data, Ontologies that guide every decision, X AI that hyper-personalizes experiences, and Agents that work alongside teams, Phenom’s platform uses industry and business context to automate workflows, eliminate busywork, and enhance every experience while remaining compliant. Driven by a purpose to help a billion people find the right work, no other company is as dedicated to helping organizations hire faster, develop better and retain longer.
TechIntelPro empowers B2B technology decision-makers with the latest industry trends, deep insights, leadership perspectives and actionable intelligence to drive both organizational and professional milestones—and thrive on the tech pulse.