Ascent Programs, a leading corporate organization overseeing a critical network of residential and wilderness treatment programs for teens and young adults across Utah, has revolutionized its talent acquisition strategy through the comprehensive implementation of Workable, an advanced applicant tracking system. This strategic move has centralized formerly disparate hiring efforts, yielding substantial improvements in efficiency, reporting, standardization, and candidate quality across its six specialized facilities, which collectively employ over 600 individuals dedicated to providing life-changing care.
Who is Ascent Programs? A Commitment to Youth Well-being
Ascent Programs operates at the forefront of mental and behavioral health treatment for adolescents and young adults, providing essential therapeutic interventions in both residential and wilderness settings. Their mission is inherently reliant on the quality and dedication of their staff. Programs like Three Peaks Ascent, their initial pilot site for Workable, offer intensive, structured environments designed to foster growth, healing, and personal development. The nature of this work — addressing complex emotional, behavioral, and developmental challenges — demands a highly skilled, empathetic, and resilient workforce. The organization’s operational footprint spans multiple sites, each with unique needs but unified by a common commitment to client success.
Overseeing the intricate HR operations at the corporate level is Jodi Levie, who is responsible not only for corporate office hiring but also for orchestrating a cohesive strategy with HR directors embedded at each program site. This decentralized yet interconnected structure presents a unique set of challenges, necessitating both localized responsiveness to program-specific staffing needs and enterprise-wide consistency to maintain quality, compliance, and strategic oversight. Before the integration of Workable, achieving this delicate balance proved to be an uphill battle, characterized by fragmentation and a lack of consolidated insight.
The roles Ascent seeks to fill are diverse and critical, spanning the full spectrum of clinical and residential care. Admissions teams are the crucial first point of contact, facilitating client intake and ensuring appropriate placement. Licensed therapists are foundational to the treatment model, managing caseloads and delivering specialized care. Certified teachers are essential for maintaining educational continuity within residential programs. However, the highest volume — and often the most challenging — hiring need is for residential staff. These individuals work directly and continuously with clients, providing round-the-clock support and supervision, a role that, while incredibly rewarding, often experiences higher turnover due to its demanding nature. Specialized roles, such as those requiring specific licenses or certifications, introduce additional layers of complexity, particularly in competitive job markets or when stringent credentialing is required. The ability to efficiently recruit and retain talent across this broad spectrum of roles is not merely an HR function; it is a direct determinant of the organization’s capacity to serve its clients effectively.
The Pre-Workable Landscape: A Fragmented Approach to Talent Acquisition
Prior to the adoption of Workable, Ascent Programs’ hiring ecosystem was a patchwork of independent efforts, lacking any unified infrastructure or centralized oversight. Each of the six program sites operated autonomously, with its HR director individually managing every aspect of the recruitment process. This meant each director was responsible for creating and posting job advertisements, primarily through individual Indeed accounts, handling payments, coordinating interviews, and managing candidate pipelines. The absence of a shared platform resulted in a significant lack of collaboration, unified data, and, crucially, corporate-level visibility into overall hiring performance.
The consequences of this decentralized model were manifold and predictable. The entire recruitment cycle, from initial outreach to offer, was considerably slower, as the administrative burden for each hire fell solely on a single individual at each site. This siloed approach meant that interview questions and evaluation criteria varied widely from one program to another, leading to inconsistencies in candidate assessment and raising potential concerns about equitable hiring practices. Collaboration between HR personnel and the clinical or operational teams was limited, hindering a holistic understanding of staffing needs and candidate suitability.
A critical deficiency was the complete absence of data. Jodi Levie highlighted this challenge, stating, "There was no visibility at the corporate level. We weren’t able to report on anything." This lack of aggregated data meant that when hiring difficulties arose — whether localized to a specific program or indicative of broader market trends — the corporate office had no empirical basis to diagnose the root cause or formulate an informed response. For instance, without data, it was impossible to discern whether a particular hiring challenge stemmed from an inefficient internal process or external market dynamics, such as a shortage of qualified candidates in a specific geographic area or for a specialized role. This fundamental lack of insight severely hampered Ascent’s ability to develop a data-driven talent acquisition strategy essential for organizational growth and scalability.
The Catalyst for Change: Seeking Visibility and Accountability
The imperative to transition to a unified hiring solution was driven by two overarching strategic priorities: enhancing corporate visibility and ensuring accountability across all program sites. Ascent’s leadership recognized the critical need to present a comprehensive, data-driven overview of hiring performance to its board of directors, moving beyond anecdotal accounts to substantiated metrics. Concurrently, the organization required a robust platform capable of instilling consistency and standardization across its inherently multi-site hiring operations, while still allowing for the necessary flexibility to address localized needs.
The journey to a unified system began with a pilot implementation at Three Peaks Ascent, the organization’s wilderness program. The successful integration and demonstrated benefits at this initial site paved the way for a broader rollout across the entire network. For Jodi Levie and her team, the paramount criteria for selecting a new system were ease of implementation and its tangible organizational impact. Workable met both these benchmarks with remarkable success.
Early adopters within the HR teams quickly recognized the platform’s potential to significantly streamline their daily tasks and reduce administrative overhead. This immediate, practical benefit fostered a grassroots adoption process that was organic and driven by user experience, rather than a top-down corporate mandate. As the positive feedback and time-saving advantages propagated across the sites, the momentum for full adoption grew naturally. As Levie recounted, "Some people get set in their ways, and they don’t like change. 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 widespread enthusiasm underscores Workable’s intuitive design and its ability to genuinely simplify complex HR processes.
A key factor that accelerated this rapid and enthusiastic adoption was a deliberate decision to extend hiring team access beyond just HR personnel. By empowering more employees – particularly hiring managers and team leads – with visibility into candidate pipelines for their respective teams and granting them a voice in the selection process, Ascent cultivated a sense of ownership and direct involvement. This inclusive approach transformed platform adoption from a mere policy directive into a recognized operational benefit, aligning individual team success with the broader organizational goal of efficient and effective talent acquisition.
Transformative Outcomes: Quantifiable Improvements in Recruitment
The implementation of Workable has translated into tangible, measurable benefits across Ascent Programs’ entire hiring ecosystem, validating the strategic decision to centralize and standardize its recruitment efforts. The "Quick Results" table highlights several critical areas of improvement:
- Time Savings: A conservative estimate suggests an average saving of 3 to 5 hours per hire. For an organization with over 600 employees and ongoing recruitment needs, this translates into thousands of hours annually redirected from administrative tasks to more strategic HR initiatives or direct support for program staff. This reduction in administrative burden has freed up HR personnel at both the corporate and site levels, allowing them to focus on talent strategy, employee development, and retention.
- Visibility: Before Workable, corporate-level reporting on hiring metrics was non-existent. Now, the corporate office has a comprehensive overview of recruitment performance across all six programs. This newfound visibility empowers leadership and the board of directors with data-driven updates, allowing for informed decision-making regarding staffing levels, budget allocation, and strategic growth.
- Standardization: Workable has enabled the creation of consistent interview workflows and standardized question sets across all programs for similar roles. This ensures that every candidate for a specific position, regardless of the program site, undergoes a uniform evaluation process. This consistency is crucial for reducing compliance risks and fostering more defensible, equitable hiring decisions, ensuring that "apples are compared to apples," as Levie emphasized.
- Candidate Quality: Hiring teams consistently report a noticeable increase in the quality of applicants. This improvement is attributed to Workable’s expanded candidate reach through multi-board job distribution, which casts a wider net for talent, and its structured evaluation tools that help identify the most suitable candidates earlier in the process. Better candidate quality directly translates to stronger teams and improved client care.
- Scalability: The successful expansion from a single pilot program to all six sites within a relatively short period demonstrates Workable’s inherent scalability. The platform now serves as a unified hiring infrastructure supporting the entire organization, accommodating its growth and diverse staffing needs without compromising efficiency or consistency.
- Adoption: The rapid and full platform adoption across all sites within one year is a testament to Workable’s user-friendliness and perceived value. This high adoption rate means that HR directors and hiring managers across Ascent Programs are operating from a single source of truth, fostering collaboration and streamlining communication.
Standardization: Ensuring Equity and Mitigating Risk
One of the most profound and impactful shifts facilitated by Workable has been the successful implementation of structured, consistent hiring processes across all six Ascent Programs. In the past, there was no reliable mechanism to ensure that a therapist candidate applying to one program was evaluated against the same criteria or asked the same questions as a therapist candidate at another site. This variability created potential vulnerabilities regarding compliance and fairness.
With Workable, Ascent has systematically built role-specific workflows and developed standardized interview question sets tailored for each position type. This ranges from high-volume residential staff roles, which might have a more streamlined process, to complex clinical positions requiring multiple stages of evaluation, including specialized technical assessments and peer interviews. The critical outcome is that every candidate applying for the same role now navigates an identical application and interview process, is asked the same set of questions, and is assessed against a uniform set of criteria.
The implications of this standardization extend far beyond mere operational efficiency. Crucially, it significantly reduces the risk of inconsistency-driven compliance issues, which can arise from varying interview approaches or subjective evaluation methods. By ensuring that hiring decisions are made on a defensible and equitable basis, Ascent fortifies its commitment to fair employment practices and mitigates potential legal challenges. As Jodi Levie articulated, "Standardization was huge for us. 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." This systematic approach builds a stronger, more transparent, and ethically sound recruitment framework.
Furthermore, Workable’s flexibility allows Ascent to customize these standardized workflows according to the specific demands of each role. This means that while core principles of consistency are maintained, the process can be adapted to accommodate the unique requirements of a licensed therapist versus a residential staff member. This ability to standardize without flattening the necessary nuance that different positions entail is a testament to the platform’s adaptability and Ascent’s strategic implementation.
Data-Driven Decisions: Elevating HR to a Strategic Function
Perhaps the most transformative impact of Workable for Ascent Programs has been the newfound capability for robust, data-driven reporting. In the pre-Workable era, the organization simply lacked any centralized data, rendering strategic analysis of recruitment performance impossible. Now, the corporate HR team possesses the tools to meticulously track key performance indicators such as time to hire, the volume of qualified candidates, and candidate source across all six programs. This comprehensive data is not merely collected; it is actively leveraged to inform critical decisions at both operational and strategic levels.
The reporting features within Workable are, according to Jodi Levie, remarkably user-friendly, enabling the team to generate insightful reports with ease. Beyond retrospective analysis, Ascent has also begun to tap into the value of Workable’s predictive reporting functionality. This feature aids in identifying emerging patterns in application flow and candidate availability. For example, if a particular program site begins to struggle with filling a specific role, HR can now consult historical data to determine whether this challenge represents a temporary market fluctuation or indicates a more systemic issue that warrants a targeted intervention, such as adjusting compensation, expanding sourcing channels, or refining job descriptions. This proactive capability transforms problem-solving from reactive guesswork to informed strategy.
Levie underscored the profound impact of this capability: "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 and anecdote to evidence-based insights represents a significant elevation of the HR function within Ascent Programs. It moves HR from a primarily administrative support role to a strategic contributor, directly influencing organizational planning, resource allocation, and ultimately, the ability to fulfill its core mission. The ability to present clear, quantifiable data to the board of directors not only enhances transparency but also solidifies HR’s position as a vital strategic partner in Ascent’s continued success and growth.
Efficiency and Quality: Meeting High-Volume Demands
For an organization like Ascent Programs, where staffing levels are directly correlated with client capacity and the ability to provide essential care, the agility to respond quickly to spikes in hiring demand is an operational imperative. When new clients are admitted into a program, Ascent must swiftly scale its workforce to match. Workable provides the robust infrastructure necessary to achieve this responsiveness without compromising the quality or integrity of the recruitment process.
The platform’s efficiency enhancements have been significant, saving an estimated three to five hours per hire across various stages of the recruitment funnel, including initial research, candidate outreach, and interview coordination. A key feature contributing to this efficiency is multi-board job distribution. Instead of HR personnel manually posting job advertisements on individual platforms, Workable automates this process, ensuring that roles reach a broad candidate pool across multiple job boards and professional networks with a single action.
Furthermore, functionalities like self-scheduling for candidates and integrated candidate texting have dramatically streamlined communication. These tools reduce the back-and-forth typically associated with scheduling interviews and conveying updates, improving both the candidate experience and the recruiter’s productivity. Ascent Programs is also actively exploring and expanding its utilization of automated messaging workflows to inject even greater consistency and speed into candidate communication, ensuring timely and professional engagement at every touchpoint.
Beyond speed, the quality of talent has demonstrably improved. Hiring teams across all six programs consistently report encountering a higher caliber of applicants. This positive shift is a direct consequence of both the broader distribution of job postings, attracting a more diverse and skilled pool of candidates, and the more structured evaluation processes enabled by Workable. By filtering for fit and qualifications earlier in the process, Ascent ensures that its hiring managers are spending their valuable time assessing truly promising candidates, ultimately leading to stronger teams and enhanced therapeutic outcomes for the teens and young adults they serve.
A Seamless Candidate Experience That Works
From the candidate’s perspective, the application journey with Ascent Programs, powered by Workable, is designed to be seamless and user-friendly. Regardless of how an applicant discovers a job opening – be it through a major job board like Indeed, direct traffic to Ascent’s careers page, or through internal referral channels – their information is routed directly and efficiently into the Workable system. This unified intake process eliminates the need for HR teams to manage multiple disparate platforms or reconcile data across various systems, consolidating all candidate information into a single, accessible location.
This centralization ensures consistency and prevents potential data loss or fragmentation, which can often detract from the candidate experience. As Jodi Levie noted, "It’s great that it’s all in one place. 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." This flexibility is key; it allows candidates to apply through their preferred channels while guaranteeing that Ascent’s HR team captures all necessary details for evaluation.
Crucially, the application process itself has proven to be a non-factor for friction. Candidates generally find it straightforward and easy to navigate, with the organization reporting no significant complaints or negative feedback regarding the application experience. In today’s competitive talent market, a smooth and positive candidate experience is vital for attracting top talent and reinforcing an organization’s employer brand. By removing common hurdles and streamlining the initial engagement, Ascent Programs ensures that prospective employees’ first impression is a positive one, setting the stage for effective recruitment and talent acquisition.
Looking Ahead: Continuous Optimization for Critical Care
As Ascent Programs continues its trajectory of growth and expansion, the organization is committed to further leveraging and optimizing its investment in Workable’s capabilities. Future plans include a deliberate expansion of automated messaging features and the integration of AI screening functionalities. These advancements are aimed at making existing recruitment workflows even more intentional, personalized, and efficient, thereby maximizing the return on the robust infrastructure already in place.
For an organization deeply entrenched in clinical hiring at scale, where the quality and suitability of every single hire directly impact the well-being and therapeutic progress of the vulnerable teens and young adults they serve, this commitment to continuous improvement is not merely an operational nicety. It is a fundamental ethical imperative. The stakes are exceptionally high; a compassionate, skilled, and stable workforce is the bedrock of effective treatment and positive client outcomes.
Workable has provided Ascent Programs with a robust foundation characterized by enhanced visibility, critical standardization, and improved speed in its recruitment processes. Building upon this solid base, the Ascent team is actively developing a hiring function that is genuinely strategic, adaptable, and capable of not only supporting the organization’s ongoing growth but also, more importantly, furthering its profound mission of healing and rehabilitation. This strategic evolution ensures that Ascent Programs remains at the forefront of providing exceptional care, underpinned by an equally exceptional talent acquisition framework.
