Ascent Programs, a pivotal corporate entity overseeing a diverse network of residential and wilderness treatment programs for adolescents and young adults across Utah, has revolutionized its human resources operations through the strategic implementation of Workable, a leading applicant tracking system. This comprehensive overhaul has enabled the organization, which supports over 600 employees across six distinct program sites, to transition from a fragmented, decentralized hiring model to a unified, data-driven system, delivering significant improvements in efficiency, compliance, and strategic reporting. The initial deployment at Three Peaks Ascent, the organization’s renowned wilderness program, served as a successful pilot before the platform was scaled across all facilities, demonstrating its adaptability and profound impact on complex multi-site operations.
Ascent Programs: Addressing a Critical Need in Youth Mental Health
Ascent Programs stands at the forefront of providing vital mental health and behavioral support services to vulnerable populations. Their network encompasses specialized residential care and immersive wilderness therapy, catering to teens and young adults facing a range of challenges. The nature of their work is inherently complex and demands a highly skilled, dedicated, and compassionate workforce. Roles within Ascent span the entire spectrum of clinical and residential care, from admissions teams who are the first point of contact for clients and families, to licensed therapists crucial for delivering evidence-based treatment, to certified teachers providing educational continuity, and residential staff who offer continuous, direct client support.
This sector faces unique staffing challenges. Residential staff roles, while critical, often experience high turnover due to the demanding nature of the work, which typically involves round-the-clock care and intensive therapeutic engagement. Furthermore, specialized positions like licensed therapists and certified teachers are often subject to tight labor markets, requiring targeted recruitment strategies and stringent credentialing processes. The ability to quickly and effectively staff these roles directly impacts client capacity and, ultimately, the organization’s ability to fulfill its mission of providing life-changing care. In a landscape where the demand for youth mental health services continues to grow, efficient and effective hiring is not merely an administrative function but a strategic imperative.
The Decentralized Dilemma: Hiring Before Workable
Prior to Workable’s introduction, Ascent Programs operated with an entirely decentralized hiring structure. Each of the six program sites, functioning almost as independent entities, managed its own recruitment processes. This meant that individual HR directors at each location were solely responsible for everything from crafting and posting job advertisements – often through individual Indeed accounts – to coordinating interviews, managing candidate communications, and handling all administrative tasks related to a new hire. This autonomy, while offering local flexibility, came at a significant cost to organizational coherence and efficiency.
The consequences of this fragmented approach were numerous and far-reaching. Without a shared infrastructure or centralized data repository, Ascent lacked any unified insight into its hiring performance. Corporate leadership had no visibility into critical metrics like time-to-hire, candidate sources, or applicant volume across the network. Reporting on hiring activities to the board of directors was based on anecdotal evidence rather than robust data, hindering strategic planning and accountability.
Moreover, the lack of standardization created inconsistencies in the candidate experience and evaluation processes. Interview questions and assessment criteria varied significantly from one site to another, even for identical roles. This not only raised concerns about fairness and equity but also posed potential compliance risks, as there was no consistent framework to ensure defensible hiring decisions. Collaboration between HR and operational or clinical teams was often limited, further slowing down recruitment cycles. When specific hiring challenges arose at a particular site, whether due to market conditions or process inefficiencies, there was no data to diagnose the root cause or inform a targeted intervention. Jodi Levie, who oversees corporate HR operations and manages hiring for the corporate office, articulated this challenge clearly: "There was no visibility at the corporate level. We weren’t able to report on anything." This profound absence of data made it impossible for Ascent to develop a scalable, data-driven talent acquisition strategy essential for its growth and mission.
The Catalyst for Change: Seeking Visibility and Accountability
The decision to seek a unified hiring solution was driven by two overarching strategic priorities for Ascent Programs: achieving greater visibility into recruitment performance and enhancing accountability across the organization. Corporate leadership recognized the imperative to present concrete, data-driven hiring performance metrics to the board of directors, moving beyond subjective reports to objective evidence. Concurrently, the organization needed a platform capable of bringing much-needed consistency and standardization to a hiring process that, by its very nature, operated across multiple geographically dispersed and independently managed sites.
After careful consideration, Workable was selected for its promise of ease of implementation and its potential for significant organizational impact. The rollout began strategically at Three Peaks Ascent, serving as a pilot program. This phased approach allowed the HR team to test the platform, gather feedback, and demonstrate its value before a broader deployment. The positive results from this initial phase quickly became apparent, paving the way for Workable’s expansion across all six programs.
Workable’s Implementation Journey: From Pilot to Enterprise-Wide Adoption
The implementation of Workable was characterized by its smooth integration and rapid user adoption. For Jodi Levie and her team, a key factor in the platform’s success was its intuitive design, which significantly reduced the learning curve for HR directors and hiring managers. Early adopters within the HR team almost immediately recognized the substantial time savings Workable offered, particularly in automating routine administrative tasks. This demonstrable value proved to be the most potent driver of adoption across the organization.
Rather than relying solely on a top-down mandate, Ascent fostered a culture where the benefits of Workable spread organically. As HR professionals at various sites shared their positive experiences and the tangible improvements in their daily workflows, resistance to change diminished. "Some people get set in their ways, and they don’t like change," Levie noted, "But as we talked about how much easier it was making our lives, it grew. Within a year, everyone was saying this is so much better." This rapid, value-driven adoption meant that within a single year, Workable became the single source of truth for hiring across all six Ascent Programs sites.
A strategic decision that further accelerated adoption was the expansion of hiring team access beyond just HR personnel. By empowering more employees, including clinical and operational managers, with visibility into candidate pipelines for their respective teams and a direct voice in the selection process, Ascent cultivated a sense of ownership. This inclusive approach transformed platform adoption from a mere policy compliance exercise into a perceived benefit, fostering greater engagement and collaborative hiring practices.
Transformative Outcomes: Quantifiable Improvements
The implementation of Workable has yielded a host of quantifiable and qualitative improvements across Ascent Programs’ hiring landscape, fundamentally reshaping its HR function.
Time Savings and Operational Efficiency: One of the most immediate and impactful benefits has been the dramatic reduction in administrative burden. Workable is estimated to save three to five hours per hire, a significant figure when scaled across an organization with over 600 employees and continuous hiring needs. This efficiency gain stems from features like multi-board job distribution, which automatically posts job openings across various platforms without manual effort; streamlined communication tools like self-scheduling and candidate texting; and the ongoing expansion of automated messaging workflows. These efficiencies allow HR teams to focus on strategic recruitment rather than repetitive administrative tasks.
Enhanced Visibility and Data-Driven Strategy: Perhaps the most transformative shift has been the ability to generate comprehensive corporate-level reporting, a capability that was entirely absent before Workable. Ascent’s corporate HR team now tracks critical metrics such as time-to-hire, qualified candidate volume, and candidate source across all six programs. This data is invaluable for informing both operational adjustments and strategic decision-making. Leadership and the board of directors now receive regular, data-driven updates on hiring performance, fostering greater accountability and enabling a proactive approach to talent acquisition. The predictive reporting functionality has also proven beneficial, helping to identify patterns in application flow and diagnose whether hiring challenges are market-driven or process-related. As Levie highlighted, "We can now report to our board of directors. We can show them areas of improvement, areas that have improved, and explain why we’re having a challenge in a specific area. We have data to drive our strategies now." This shift from instinct to evidence has profoundly elevated the HR function within Ascent.
Standardization: Ensuring Fairness and Compliance: Workable has enabled a crucial move towards structured and consistent hiring practices across all six programs. Previously, there was no guarantee that candidates for the same role, such as a therapist, were evaluated against identical criteria across different sites. With Workable, Ascent has developed role-specific workflows and standardized interview question sets for every position type. This means every candidate for a given role now progresses through the same process, is asked the same questions, and is evaluated against the same, objective criteria. This standardization is critical for reducing compliance risks associated with inconsistent hiring practices and ensures that all hiring decisions are made on a defensible and equitable basis. "Standardization was huge for us," Levie stated. "We’re making sure we avoid any potential discrimination issues by asking the same questions for the same group of people – comparing apples to apples." The platform’s flexibility also allows for customization of workflows, accommodating the multi-stage evaluation often required for complex clinical hires while maintaining streamlined processes for higher-volume residential roles.
Elevated Candidate Quality and Experience: Hiring teams across all programs consistently report seeing a higher volume of qualified applicants. This improvement is attributed to Workable’s broader job distribution capabilities, which expand the reach of job postings, and the more structured evaluation processes that filter for suitable candidates earlier in the recruitment funnel. On the candidate side, the experience has become remarkably seamless. Whether applicants originate from Indeed, Ascent’s direct careers page, or referral channels, their information is automatically routed into Workable. This eliminates the need for HR to manage multiple platforms or reconcile data, centralizing all candidate information in one place. Candidates find the application process straightforward, contributing to a positive employer brand. "It’s great that it’s all in one place," Levie confirmed. "Someone can apply from Indeed or another platform and it feeds right through to us. Candidates can do what they want, and we still get the information."
Scalability and Future-Proofing: The successful expansion of Workable from a single pilot program to all six sites underscores its inherent scalability. This unified hiring infrastructure now efficiently supports over 600 employees, providing a robust foundation for Ascent’s continued growth. For an organization whose client capacity is directly tied to its staffing levels, the ability to rapidly scale hiring to match increasing client demand is an operational necessity. Workable provides the agility to do so without compromising the quality or integrity of the hiring process.
Strategic Impact on Client Care
While Workable is an HR tool, its impact extends directly to the core mission of Ascent Programs: providing high-quality care to teens and young adults. By streamlining the hiring process, reducing time-to-hire, and improving the quality of candidates, Ascent can more effectively maintain optimal staff-to-client ratios. This directly translates to better supervision, more consistent therapeutic interventions, and a higher standard of care. When specialized roles like licensed therapists are filled more efficiently with highly qualified individuals, the overall efficacy of the treatment programs is enhanced. In an environment where the wellbeing of vulnerable youth is paramount, a strategic and efficient hiring function is not just a convenience, but a critical component of ethical and effective service delivery.
The Path Forward: Continuous Optimization
Looking ahead, Ascent Programs is committed to further maximizing its investment in Workable. The organization is in the process of deliberately expanding its utilization of advanced capabilities, particularly around automated messaging and AI screening. These initiatives aim to refine existing workflows, make candidate communication even more intentional, and further optimize the efficiency and effectiveness of the recruitment pipeline. This commitment to continuous improvement reflects a fundamental understanding that in the dynamic field of clinical hiring, where the quality of every hire directly impacts client outcomes, ongoing refinement of talent acquisition strategies is essential.
Workable has provided Ascent Programs with a robust and adaptable foundation built on visibility, standardization, and speed. Upon this foundation, the HR team is actively constructing a genuinely strategic talent acquisition function, one that is not only capable of supporting the organization’s ambitious growth objectives but also deeply aligned with its profound mission of transforming the lives of the teens and young adults it serves. This transformation exemplifies how technological adoption, when strategically implemented, can elevate HR from an administrative role to a pivotal strategic partner in achieving organizational success and mission fulfillment.
