Transforming the technologies underpinning a successful talent acquisition strategy will never be a short-haul journey.

For Fortune 100 aviation giant United Airlines, it’s a multi-year project, rooted in partnership with technology provider Phenom, to ensure that the company isn’t left sitting on the tarmac.

Speaking to UNLEASH about the airline’s ongoing work, Jessica Austin, Director of Talent Acquisition Programs, Process and Systems, explained that the process is part of the bigger picture of the organization’s future.

“We’re modernizing our technology to be competitive with others in the space,” Austin tells UNLEASH.

“There’s just so many new things in the recruitment technology space; we have to continue to improve to keep pace with other companies. That’s just the long and short of it.”

With around 97,000 employees occupying a variety of corporate and frontline roles at United, such a transformation takes both time and a steady hand at the wheel.

Austin, having held senior talent acquisition and people management positions with CVS Group and Citibank previously, was brought in to oversee the operation at United in 2022.

“I came from a large pharmaceutical retail company and during the COVID-19 pandemic we didn’t have tools like this. It would have been a game changer for me,” she says.

When I came in, I saw some of this technology and thought: Where has this been all my life?”

The adoption of the Phenom platform means United is able to “think differently”, reducing the administrative burden on its recruitment teams through more “intuitive processes” which also “continuously give us good feedback”.

The United leadership team are “excited about the journey”, Austin explains, even though a lot of the technology is still new to many. There is “definitely a lot of educating people on the process”.

While the technology involved is “evolving and changing constantly”, Austin knows that staying ahead of the curve and understanding how it impacts both United, its hiring managers and the candidates it attracts, is vital.

“It’s part of my job to as the ‘business person’ implementing this tool to keep our senior leaders aware of the functionality and how it’s going to help us, to keep us moving forward.”

“A lot of it is telling the story and showing people what the benefits are.”

Supporting recruitment for the frontlines

Jessica Austin, Director of Talent Acquisition Programs, Process and Systems at United Airlines

United completed the implementation of the Phenom platform across recruitment for corporate roles comprising digital technologies and cybersecurity, HR and finance, in May last year.

Austin says that these processes are now more “streamlined and generating insights” that can inform further changes as needed into the airline’s recruiting process.

One of the next key areas of focus for Austin and United will be rolling out the platform to ‘frontline’ roles, which include positions like baggage handlers and flight attendants. In other words, the ones who “make the travel happen.”

These can be the vacancies that generate the most interest among candidates – indeed, Austin details that United will receive anywhere between 12,000 to 15,000 applications for a single flight attendant role.

The sheer volume of applications illustrates the drawing power of both United as an employer and the roles it offers; as such, the platform will need be able to handle this weight of traffic – something both United and Phenom are currently working towards.

Around 400-500 applicants are moved on to the interview stage, which is then funneled down to between 50-100 candidates who are offered a role. Increased automation will play a pivotal role here for the airline going forward.

“We want to delve into that and really start to harness the power of the tool and be able to, engage this automation as part of our workflow going forward.”

“It will change people’s jobs a little. So it’s a lot of change management and changing the way that people are thinking; don’t be as administrative, try to be strategic in your partnership with the hiring leader,” Austin explains.

As the rollout continues, modifications and adjustments will also be needed to address the “little nuances” that come with hiring within the aviation sector and for United’s specific requirements.

A large part of this, Austin explains, is taking out the “administrative parts” that historically has meant “moving people forward manually; it’s a lot of clicks to get something done.”

“Because there’s a lot of non-value add things sometimes in the recruiting process, just to move somebody through them through the steps.”

As such, Austin says the next consideration is how United can “eliminate some of that” and improve the overall recruitment experience, across hiring managers, recruiters and candidates by “providing it all in a very expeditious manner.”

Better experiences through a unified approach

One of the fundamental aspects of improving experience is consistency. Again, automation has been a pivotal element in delivering this to United’s talent acquisition strategy.

This applies both to internal staff, in terms of getting them on a single platform and managing that journey effectively, and the experience for external candidates.

A major headache for many HR and TA leaders will be facing the issues that come with using a plethora of separate tools, requiring “a lot of patching things together to make them work.”

“A lot of people refer to this as like a Frankenstein system,” Austin explains. “That itself was part of the challenge, really trying to navigate that and also not having control over making changes quickly to our career site.”

Expediting faster change on the site is a big deal given the sheer volume of traffic and engagement it receives – since 2022, United’s career site has recorded nearly 7 million visitors, 650k+ applications and 17,000 new hires.

At present, United posts jobs on its careers site around every two hours using an automation tool, meaning “we are able to change content fairly quickly.”

Previously, those are things that would take a little while, a couple of days, at least. To change content, we had to actually engage our outside vendor in order to do that.”

Communications with candidates is another piece now automated through the platform, avoiding any applicant not being informed of their progress accidentally – a critical part considering they may be one of 10,000 applicants.

Like many employers, United has adopted a chatbot as part of its career site to help guide applicants. Dubbed the ‘Career Captain’, the chatbot is in use to answer candidate questions but also to recommend current openings that line up with information provided by the potential applicant.

“It’s setting the stage for that engagement from a candidate perspective to use the chatbot, in order to help facilitate that conversation right now,” Austin says, “It’s just serving up those recommendations.”

Once United launches high-volume hiring on the platform, that Career Captain bot will have the capability to help candidates begin filling out the application and either moving them forward through the process or informing them if they don’t qualify.

But it’s not just external candidates United is focusing on.

The airline launched its employee portal on the Phenom portal in September last year to promote internal mobility opportunities, in what Austin calls a “multi-step process.”

Information shared by employees, via a resume or LinkedIn profile, is parsed by the platform’s matching criteria function. It also allows them to fully edit anything, putting particular skills in the foreground.

“That information is integral to how we are looking at internal candidates… the matching criteria takes a job, and what skills are needed for that – how many years of experience, what location, etc. – and it matches candidates to it.

That’s part of this journey is getting them to fill that out. But they get recommendations from the system saying ‘hey, this might be a good fit for you based on the profile that you loaded. So that, I think, is super powerful.”