Why Franchises Outgrow Phenom (And What Pushed Us to Switch)
Look, Phenom is a decent talent experience platform. But if you're running 40+ franchise locations and hiring shift workers at volume, you've probably hit the same wall we did.
The platform was built for corporate TA teams. Not for a GM in Tulsa who needs to fill three line cook slots by Friday. We were paying enterprise pricing and still had recruiters manually nudging candidates through the funnel.
Here's the math that broke us: we had two HR coordinators spending roughly 60% of their week on scheduling interviews, chasing I-9s, and answering the same benefits questions from 200+ employees. That's about $85K/year in salary going to work an ai hr agent can do before lunch.
Switching to Aiinak's AI HR Agent at $499/month wasn't about saving money first. It was about response time. Franchise candidates ghost fast — if you don't text them back within an hour, they've already accepted at the Chipotle down the street.
Week 1: Planning and Data Audit Before You Touch Anything
Don't start with the migration. Start with the audit. This is where most franchise ops teams screw up.
Spend the first three days mapping what Phenom is actually doing for you. Not what the contract says — what it's doing. Open your Phenom admin and list:
- Every active req template and the locations using it
- Your CRM pool size (we had 14,000 passive candidates we almost lost)
- Chatbot scripts and their intent mappings
- Career site redirects and SEO-indexed job URLs
- Compliance docs tied to specific states (California and NYC will bite you)
The SEO piece matters more than people think. If you delete Phenom-hosted job URLs cold, you'll lose 2-4 weeks of organic application traffic while Google reindexes. Set up 301 redirects before go-live, not after.
Then pull your contract. Phenom typically has 30-60 day termination notice clauses and data export windows that close fast. Get your export scheduled for day 10, not day 14.
Data Migration: What Actually Moves and What Doesn't
Here's the honest part. Not everything ports cleanly. I'll save you the headache.
Moves easily: Candidate records, req data, application history, and interview feedback notes. Aiinak's HR Agent ingests standard HRIS/ATS exports (CSV or API pull from Workday, BambooHR, UKG — whatever you have underneath Phenom).
Moves with work: Chatbot conversation flows. Phenom's chatbot uses rule-based intent trees. The Aiinak agent is LLM-native, so you don't rebuild the flows — you write guidelines. Think of it as trading a flowchart for a job description. Took us about six hours to write policy docs the agent actually follows.
Doesn't move: Phenom's analytics dashboards. You'll rebuild reporting. Honestly? The Aiinak agent logs every action it takes (emails sent, interviews scheduled, questions answered), so the raw data is richer. But your VP of HR's custom funnel dashboard is gone. Budget a day for your ops analyst to recreate the three reports that actually get looked at.
The gotcha: Phenom's fit scores don't transfer. Those are proprietary. The ai recruiting agent in Aiinak re-scores your pool using its own ranking — and in our test, rankings shifted noticeably for about 15% of candidates. Not better or worse, just different. Communicate this to hiring managers before they freak out.
Training Your Franchise Managers (The Part Everyone Underestimates)
If your franchisees don't adopt the tool, none of this matters. And franchise GMs are a tough crowd — they've been burned by corporate tech rollouts before.
Keep training under 45 minutes. Seriously. Any longer and you lose them. Here's what we covered:
- How to post a req (5 min): One form, agent handles the rest
- How to review the agent's candidate shortlist (10 min): Thumbs up, thumbs down, or "interview"
- How to override the agent (10 min): This is the trust-builder — show them they're still in control
- Employee questions (10 min): Point staff to the agent for PTO, benefits, schedule questions
- Escalation path (5 min): When the agent hands off to a human
Record one 20-minute Loom for new GMs. We update it quarterly. Works better than any LMS course.
One thing we missed on the first pass: franchisees wanted to see the agent's actual messages to candidates before they went out. For the first two weeks, we put the agent in "draft mode" where the GM approves each outbound. After trust built, we flipped it to autonomous. Do this. Don't skip it.
The Parallel Running Period: 7-10 Days, Not Longer
Run both systems in parallel for roughly a week. Any longer and your team just uses Phenom because it's familiar.
Pick 3-5 pilot locations. Ideally a mix — your best-run franchise, your worst-run one, and a couple in the middle. This exposes edge cases. Your best location will push the agent's automation limits. Your worst one will reveal data hygiene problems you didn't know you had.
During parallel running, track three things:
- Time-to-first-contact: Phenom averaged 4-6 hours for us. The Aiinak agent hit candidates inside 3 minutes. That alone moved our offer acceptance rate meaningfully.
- Agent error rate: How often does a human have to override or correct? Ours started at about 12% in week one and dropped to under 4% by week two as we tuned the policy docs.
- Candidate complaints: Watch for "the chatbot didn't understand me" tickets. If you see more than 2-3 per 100 applications, your prompt guidelines need work.
Don't cut Phenom until you've run at least 100 applications through the agent. That's usually enough volume to expose the 90% case and the weird 10%.
Go-Live, and What You'll Miss From Phenom
Go-live day is anticlimactic if you did the prep right. Flip the switch at end-of-week Friday, redirect career site traffic, send the "new system" email to franchisees Monday morning. Done.
Here's what you'll genuinely miss from Phenom, and I won't pretend otherwise:
- The brand-heavy career site builder. Phenom's CMS for career pages is polished. Aiinak is more API-first — you either use their hosted pages (functional, not fancy) or embed via API into your own site. We rebuilt our careers page in Webflow in about two days.
- The CRM nurture campaigns. Phenom's drip sequences for passive candidates are mature. The Aiinak agent handles this differently — it re-engages on-demand based on req needs rather than scheduled drips. Arguably smarter, but different muscle memory.
- Enterprise reporting. Mentioned earlier. Be ready to rebuild.
What compensates: the ai hr agent doesn't just screen and schedule. It handles onboarding paperwork, answers benefits questions at 11pm on a Sunday, processes leave requests, and pushes compliance docs to the right states automatically. Phenom never did any of that. You were paying a separate tool for each.
For franchise ops specifically, the 24/7 employee support piece is underrated. Shift workers don't work 9-5. Half our employee questions come in between 8pm and midnight. Before the agent, those sat in a queue until morning. Now they're answered in seconds.
Common Pitfalls (Learn From Our Mistakes)
A few things nobody warned us about:
Don't migrate during a hiring surge. We almost started ours in late Q4 when seasonal hiring was peaking. Dumb. Pick a trough month.
Over-communicate to candidates mid-funnel. Anyone already in your Phenom pipeline should get a one-line email: "Our system is updating, your application is safe." Otherwise you'll get a spike of "did you receive my resume?" emails.
Assign one owner. Not a committee. One person at corporate who owns the migration end-to-end. Ours was our ops director and it took about 15 hours of her time over two weeks.
Test compliance docs per state. Especially if you have franchises in California, New York, Illinois, or Washington. The agent handles state-specific requirements well, but verify the first 10 onboardings manually.
Ready to Run the Migration?
Total timeline: 10-14 days for most franchise operations with 20-100 locations. Budget about 20-30 hours of corporate ops time, plus 45 minutes per franchise GM for training.
At $499/month, the ai hr agent pays for itself before you finish the first full hiring cycle — usually inside 30 days for franchise ops. And you get the onboarding, employee support, and compliance work included, not as add-ons.
If you want to see how it handles your specific franchise workflow before committing, Deploy HR Agent in a sandbox and run 20 test applications through it. You'll know within a day whether this fits your operation.
Originally published on Aiinak Blog. Aiinak is an AI agent platform that runs your entire business — deploy autonomous agents for Sales, HR, Support, Finance, and IT Ops.
