PHILADELPHIA, PA — Phenom has acquired psychometric assessment company Plum as employers confront growing concerns over fake job candidates, AI-generated resumes, and unreliable hiring signals in enterprise recruiting.
The deal follows Phenom’s February acquisition of Be Applied and expands the company’s assessment capabilities across behavioral, cognitive, and situational evaluation tools used in hiring and workforce development.
Phenom said Plum’s technology analyzes behavioral patterns against more than 40,000 job profiles to predict candidate performance beyond traditional resume screening.
The acquisition comes as employers face increasing concerns about synthetic candidate profiles and falsified work histories. Gartner has projected that one in four job candidate profiles globally could be fake by 2028, according to the company.
“AI is making general intelligence a commodity, and human skills have never mattered more; yet hiring still relies on gut feelings to assess them,” Phenom CEO and co-founder Mahe Bayireddi said in a statement.
Phenom said the combined platform will allow companies to automate behavioral assessments at scale using AI agents that generate and deploy evaluations in hours rather than weeks.
The company said the system is designed to measure traits such as judgment, adaptability, resilience, and empathy across industries and geographic markets while applying automated auditing tools intended to detect demographic bias and support regulatory compliance.
The acquisition also extends Phenom’s broader strategy of integrating hiring assessments with employee development and workforce planning tools.
Phenom said behavioral data gathered during hiring can also be used for onboarding, internal mobility, succession planning, and manager coaching after employees are hired.
“Resume-based screening and basic assessments reveal what candidates have done, but aren’t well-suited for identifying leadership potential, adaptability, and learning agility,” Abhinav Shrivastava, research manager for talent acquisition and strategy at IDC, said in a statement.
Plum joins Be Applied as part of Phenom’s effort to consolidate assessment, recruiting, and workforce management functions within a single AI-driven platform aimed at large enterprise employers.
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