Phenom has announced the acquisition of Plum, a specialist in psychometric talent assessments, as organizations grapple with a growing surge of AI-generated resumes, deepfake interviews, and fabricated work histories. The move marks Phenom’s second acquisition in just 10 weeks, following its purchase of Be Applied, and completes a comprehensive assessment framework spanning cognitive, behavioral, and situational evaluation.
The acquisition comes at a critical moment for enterprise hiring, where traditional signals such as resumes are increasingly unreliable. Plum’s technology introduces a scientific approach to assessing “durable” human traits—such as empathy, adaptability, and judgment—that cannot be easily replicated by artificial intelligence. Its Role Model™ system maps behavioral profiles against more than 40,000 job types, offering predictive insights into candidate performance with significantly greater accuracy than resume screening alone.
“AI is making general intelligence a commodity, and human skills have never mattered more; yet hiring still relies on gut feelings to assess them,” said Mahe Bayireddi, CEO and co-founder of Phenom. “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.”
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Phenom has integrated Plum‘s capabilities with its own AI-powered platform, so it can now able to automate and scale assessment processes that previously consumed a lot of manual efforts. With AI, its agents are now able to create and send role-specific tests in a matter of hours, drastically cutting recruitment time while enhancing decision quality.
Besides that, the joint platform also allows companies to set their criteria for successful positions and adopt industry-specific tests for example healthcare finance, and hospitality. Apart from recruitment, the behavioral data gathered can be utilized in making onboarding, professional growth, and succession planning decisions.
As enterprises face rising risks associated with “synthetic candidates,” Phenom positions this acquisition as a critical step toward restoring trust in hiring. By unifying multiple assessment methods into a single, scalable system, the company aims to help organizations make more reliable talent decisions in an increasingly complex and AI-driven labor market.
