Phenom, an applied AI company focused on HR infrastructure, has acquired Plum, a psychometric-based talent assessment platform, marking its second acquisition in ten weeks. The deal follows the February 2026 purchase of Be Applied and completes Phenom’s full-spectrum assessment stack covering cognitive, behavioral, and situational capabilities at enterprise scale.
Plum’s Role Model technology maps behavioral blueprints against more than 40,000 real-world jobs, delivering predictions of candidate performance with an accuracy 4x that of resume screening alone. Combined with Phenom’s agentic workflows and Hypercell framework, enterprises can now assess durable human skills — including empathy, judgment, adaptability, and resilience — for any role and market without the manual burden that has historically limited behavioral science in hiring.
The acquisition addresses two converging pressures on enterprise hiring: the collapse of resumes as a reliable signal amid rising AI-generated candidate profiles, and the inability of legacy assessment tools to scale behavioral insight consistently. Gartner projects that by 2028, one in four job candidate profiles worldwide will be fake. The average cost of a bad hire, meanwhile, runs at least 30% of an employee’s first-year salary before accounting for lost productivity and team impact.
Phenom’s AI agents will automate behavioral blueprint creation from weeks to hours, with every assessment independently audited for adverse impact across demographic groups and designed to meet global data privacy standards. The behavioral data captured at hire is designed to carry forward into onboarding, career pathing, and manager coaching across the talent lifecycle.
KEY QUOTES:
“AI is making general intelligence a commodity, and human skills have never mattered more; yet hiring still relies on gut feelings to assess them. By bringing Plum’s psychometric science and models together with our skills ontologies and agentic workflows, we’re enabling every enterprise to scale behavioral assessments that predict employee performance for every role, in every market.”
Mahe Bayireddi, CEO and Co-Founder, Phenom
“Plum was built on the belief that every person has untapped potential, and organizations deserve the science to find it. Joining Phenom brings that science to every hiring team, every career decision, and every industry around the world. Performance depends on fit, not pedigree.”
Caitlin MacGregor, CEO and Co-Founder, Plum
“Integrating skills-based assessment with psychometric science delivers a more robust and reliable skill signal. Phenom’s acquisition of Plum, in addition to Be Applied, brings comprehensive assessment capabilities to the market, enabling organizations to surface both existing skills and potential, improving hiring accuracy and decision-making.”
Abhinav Shrivastava, Research Manager, Talent Acquisition and Strategy, IDC
