The landscape of youth residential and wilderness treatment programs demands not only profound expertise in therapeutic care but also robust operational infrastructure to support rapid growth and high-quality service delivery. Ascent Programs, a leading corporate entity overseeing a network of six specialized treatment centers across Utah, has successfully navigated complex staffing challenges by implementing Workable, a comprehensive applicant tracking system. This strategic adoption has revolutionized their talent acquisition process, moving from a fragmented, decentralized approach to a unified, data-driven system that has significantly enhanced efficiency, elevated candidate quality, and provided critical corporate-level visibility for its workforce of over 600 employees.
The Ascent Story: Addressing a Critical Need in Youth Treatment
Ascent Programs operates at the forefront of adolescent and young adult mental health and behavioral treatment. Their network includes residential and wilderness therapy programs, such as the prominent Three Peaks Ascent, which offer intensive, structured environments designed to foster healing and growth for vulnerable populations. The nature of this work is inherently sensitive and impactful; the quality of care provided is directly linked to the caliber of the staff, necessitating rigorous hiring practices and a strong talent pipeline. This translates into a constant and critical need for highly qualified professionals, ranging from licensed therapists and certified teachers to admissions specialists and residential care staff who provide continuous, direct client interaction.
The organization’s hiring demands are diverse and challenging. Residential staff roles, while high-volume, often face significant turnover due to the demanding nature of the work, which can involve complex emotional support and crisis intervention. Specialized positions, such as those requiring specific clinical licenses or educational certifications, present their own set of complexities, particularly in a competitive talent market where specialized mental health professionals are in high demand. Overseeing these intricate HR operations at the corporate level is Jodi Levie, whose role involves managing hiring for the corporate office while collaborating closely with HR directors embedded within each of Ascent’s six program sites. This organizational structure inherently requires a delicate balance: local flexibility to address unique site needs coupled with enterprise-wide consistency to maintain standards and ensure compliance across all programs. Before the integration of Workable, achieving this balance was a persistent and increasingly difficult undertaking, posing a significant bottleneck to organizational scaling.
A Fragmented Past: The Pre-Workable Era of Decentralized Hiring
Prior to adopting a centralized solution, Ascent Programs operated a largely decentralized hiring model, a common characteristic in rapidly expanding multi-site organizations that had not yet invested in dedicated HR technology. Each of the six program sites, under the purview of its respective HR director, independently managed its entire recruitment lifecycle. This meant individual job postings, often relying solely on standalone accounts with platforms like Indeed, and separate, often ad-hoc processes for candidate sourcing, interview coordination, and applicant management. There was no shared infrastructure to leverage collective resources, no unified database of candidate information, and, critically, no overarching visibility at the corporate level regarding hiring metrics or overall performance.
The consequences of this fragmented approach were predictable and increasingly problematic for an organization committed to growth and quality. The hiring process was often slow and inefficient, as the full administrative burden of each hire, from posting to onboarding, fell entirely on individual site HR personnel. Interview questions and evaluation criteria varied significantly from one site to another, creating inconsistencies in candidate assessment and raising potential compliance risks related to fair hiring practices. Collaboration between HR teams and the clinical or operational departments that desperately needed new staff was often limited by these siloed systems, leading to delays and potential misalignments.
Perhaps most detrimental to Ascent’s strategic ambitions was the profound lack of actionable data. As Jodi Levie observed, "There was no visibility at the corporate level. We weren’t able to report on anything." This data vacuum meant that when a hiring challenge emerged – whether a persistent difficulty in filling a specific role at one program or a broader slowdown across the organization – there was no objective data to diagnose its root cause. It was impossible to ascertain whether the issue stemmed from an inefficient internal process, a specific market challenge, or a combination of factors. This absence of data-driven insight severely hampered Ascent’s ability to develop and execute a scalable, informed talent acquisition strategy essential for its continued expansion and mission fulfillment. The inability to present quantifiable hiring performance and strategic insights to the board of directors underscored a critical need for change, pushing HR from a reactive administrative function towards a proactive, strategic partner.
Strategic Shift: The Decision to Centralize HR Technology
The imperative for a unified hiring solution at Ascent Programs emerged from two core strategic priorities identified by leadership: enhanced visibility across all operations and improved accountability for hiring outcomes. Corporate leadership recognized the urgent need to transition from anecdotal hiring updates to data-driven performance reports for the board of directors, especially as the organization scaled. Simultaneously, the organization required a robust platform capable of introducing consistency and standardization across its inherently independent multi-site operations, without stifling the local autonomy necessary for program-specific needs and nuances.
The journey towards this transformation began in late 2022, when Ascent initiated a pilot program with Workable at its Three Peaks Ascent wilderness therapy site. The decision to select Workable was guided by critical criteria: ease of implementation, which was crucial for ensuring rapid adoption across diverse teams with varying tech proficiencies, and its potential for significant organizational impact, particularly in reducing administrative burden and improving talent quality. Workable quickly demonstrated its value on both fronts. Early feedback from the HR team at Three Peaks Ascent highlighted immediate and tangible time savings, a compelling factor that catalyzed broader interest and organic adoption across the network.
As word spread about the platform’s benefits, a groundswell of support emerged, driven by the demonstrated value rather than a top-down mandate. Jodi Levie recounted the initial apprehension, stating, "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 organic adoption, a testament to Workable’s user-friendliness and tangible benefits, was further accelerated by a deliberate strategy to extend hiring team access beyond just HR personnel. By empowering clinical and operational managers to view candidates for their own teams, provide feedback, and actively participate in the selection process, Ascent fostered a sense of ownership and collaboration. This approach transformed Workable from a mere HR tool into a shared organizational asset, solidifying its place as the single source of truth for all hiring activities across the six programs by early 2024.
Tangible Results: A New Benchmark in Hiring Efficiency
The implementation of Workable has yielded a suite of measurable improvements, establishing new benchmarks for efficiency and effectiveness across Ascent Programs’ talent acquisition efforts. These rapid results underscore the platform’s transformative impact on an organization managing complex, high-stakes hiring at scale.
- Significant Time Savings: Ascent estimates a substantial reduction of three to five hours saved per hire. Considering the organization’s average annual hiring volume, particularly for high-turnover residential staff, which can exceed 100 new hires per year, this translates into an estimated 300 to 500 hours saved annually for this single category of roles. Across all six programs and diverse positions, the aggregate administrative burden reduction is projected to be in the thousands of hours annually. This frees up HR directors and hiring managers to focus on more strategic initiatives, such as talent development and retention, rather than manual coordination. Industry benchmarks suggest that effective applicant tracking systems can reduce time-to-hire by 20-30%, a metric Ascent is demonstrably achieving, if not surpassing, through streamlined processes.
- Enhanced Corporate Visibility: A foundational shift has been the establishment of corporate-level reporting, a capability that was entirely absent before Workable. Leadership and the board of directors now receive regular, data-driven updates on key hiring performance indicators, including average time-to-hire, qualified candidate volume, and candidate source effectiveness. This newfound transparency allows for informed strategic planning, efficient resource allocation, and proactive identification of potential staffing challenges.
- Robust Standardization: Workable has enabled the creation of consistent interview workflows and question sets across all programs for similar roles. This standardization has dramatically reduced compliance risks by ensuring equitable candidate assessment and fostering a fair and consistent candidate experience across the entire organization, regardless of the program site.
- Improved Candidate Quality: Hiring teams across Ascent’s programs consistently report seeing a higher caliber of applicants. This improvement is attributed to Workable’s multi-board job distribution, which effectively expands candidate pools by posting to numerous job boards and professional networks simultaneously, and its structured evaluation tools, which help filter for the best fit earlier in the process. This directly impacts the quality of therapeutic and residential care Ascent can provide to its clients.
- Proven Scalability: The successful expansion from a single pilot program to full adoption across all six
