LandCare, a national leader in commercial landscape management, has successfully revolutionized its talent acquisition processes through the strategic implementation of Workable, an advanced applicant tracking system (ATS). This transition marks a critical upgrade from an antiquated, manual system, enabling the company to dramatically increase hiring efficiency, improve candidate quality, and elevate the strategic influence of its talent acquisition (TA) team across its extensive operations. The move has yielded measurable results, including a 23% reduction in time-to-hire and a notable increase in recruitment volume across key positions, demonstrating the profound impact of modernizing recruitment infrastructure for large, distributed workforces.
The Challenge of Scale: LandCare’s Talent Acquisition Landscape
Headquartered across 76 locations in 23 states, LandCare operates a vast and geographically dispersed enterprise. At its peak season, the organization employs approximately 4,000 individuals, making it one of the largest field-based workforces within the highly competitive landscape management industry. This scale presents unique and formidable challenges for talent acquisition, necessitating a robust, agile, and user-friendly system capable of supporting high-volume hiring for a diverse array of roles.
Alex Kline, LandCare’s Director of Talent Acquisition and Employee Services, spearheads the company’s comprehensive recruitment efforts. His team of six recruiters is responsible for exempt-level, corporate, and executive hiring, while also serving as crucial subject matter experts and advisors to individual branches managing their own crew-level recruitment. The spectrum of roles LandCare seeks to fill is broad, encompassing critical operational positions such as branch administrators, production managers, account managers, and branch managers. Beyond the field, the TA team also recruits for vital corporate functions, including finance, IT, human resources, marketing, and operations, alongside periodic executive searches at the Vice President and Director levels. The sheer volume and variety of these roles, coupled with the decentralized nature of crew-level hiring, underscored the urgent need for a unified and efficient talent acquisition platform.
Prior to the adoption of Workable, LandCare was operating without a dedicated applicant tracking system, relying instead on a rudimentary plugin within its UKG human resources information system (HRIS). This plugin, as described by internal stakeholders, functioned primarily as a processing tool rather than a comprehensive recruitment management solution. Its limitations were significant: manual processes dominated every stage of the hiring pipeline, its scope was severely restricted, and it lacked the inherent capabilities to support the efficient, high-volume hiring essential for a rapidly scaling organization like LandCare. "It was a very antiquated process," Alex Kline recalled, highlighting the systemic inefficiencies. "There was really nothing about it that allowed us to manage our recruitment effort through that system. We were managing it kind of outside and then just processing everything through it."
One of the most significant pain points was job posting. The UKG integration could only push roles directly to LandCare’s internal careers page. To reach a broader pool of candidates on essential platforms like LinkedIn and Indeed, the TA team was forced to undertake separate, laborious, and manual postings for each individual job on every external site. As the company expanded and the velocity of hiring became an increasingly critical business imperative, this operational inefficiency became unsustainable, directly impacting LandCare’s ability to attract and secure top talent in a timely manner. The competitive landscape for skilled labor in commercial landscaping, particularly for specialized roles and management positions, meant that delays in recruitment could directly translate to missed growth opportunities and operational bottlenecks. The need for a comprehensive, integrated, and streamlined ATS was no longer a luxury but a strategic necessity.
Strategic Imperative: The Search for a Modern ATS
Recognizing the critical need for a transformative solution, Alex Kline embarked on an exhaustive evaluation process, meticulously assessing approximately ten different applicant tracking systems available in the market. This thorough initial review was followed by a rigorous narrowing down of contenders, first to five, then to three, and finally to two finalists. This deliberate and systematic selection process underscored LandCare’s commitment to finding a platform that not only addressed current inefficiencies but also provided a scalable foundation for future growth.
The selection criteria were multifaceted, balancing the need for advanced features with the unique operational realities of LandCare’s business model. While one of the competing finalists boasted impressive features, including robust reporting capabilities and a wide array of tools that traditionally appeal to seasoned talent acquisition professionals, LandCare’s distributed, field-based structure presented a distinct challenge. A significant portion of LandCare’s hiring managers are frequently out in the field—at job sites, in company vehicles, or engaged in client meetings—rather than seated behind desks. For any new system to be successful, it needed to achieve genuine engagement from these managers, requiring a platform that was intuitively easy to use from anywhere, with minimal onboarding or extensive training.
Workable emerged as the clear and unequivocal choice, primarily due to its unparalleled user experience and mobile accessibility. Alex Kline succinctly captured the essence of the decision: "If we would have put the other platform in front of our hiring managers, we would have never been able to get the buy-in from them that we have now. Workable makes it so simple for them." This emphasis on simplicity and ease of adoption for non-HR specialists proved to be the decisive factor. Workable successfully offered the necessary reporting capabilities and functional depth that the TA team required, while simultaneously delivering an intuitive interface that field-based hiring managers could, and indeed would, readily adopt. This potent combination of sophisticated functionality without prohibitive complexity was the cornerstone of LandCare’s decision.
A Phased Approach to Seamless Implementation
The successful implementation of Workable at LandCare was a testament to meticulous planning and collaborative execution, personally overseen by Alex Kline, who functioned as the primary project manager for the rollout. He worked in close conjunction with Workable’s dedicated implementation partner, Kashaw, ensuring a smooth transition. Rather than attempting a simultaneous overhaul of every element, Alex adopted a strategic, phased approach, delegating specific components deliberately to optimize efficiency and ensure alignment across departments.
The TA team took charge of developing and customizing candidate communication templates, standardizing outreach and enhancing the candidate experience. Concurrently, the HR team played a crucial role in aligning LandCare’s intricate organizational structure within Workable, ensuring seamless data flow and logical candidate progression across both the new ATS and the company’s existing HRIS. This collaborative effort fostered a highly responsive and adaptive implementation environment. Alex Kline lauded the synergy, stating, "The relationship was very symbiotic. We’d bring things to their attention in the afternoon and come back the next morning to viable solutions." This iterative and problem-solving approach minimized disruptions and accelerated the integration process.
The result was an exceptionally efficient and effective phased rollout. Within a remarkably short six-week timeframe, the entire Talent Acquisition team was fully operational on Workable, demonstrating the platform’s intuitive design and the team’s proactive engagement. Following an initial two-week period of internal use, dedicated to fine-tuning workflow details and meticulously documenting any edge cases or specific scenarios, Workable was officially launched to the broader business. This strategic internal testing period ensured that the system was robust and tailored to LandCare’s specific needs before wider deployment. Impressively, full company adoption was achieved within a mere eight weeks of the initial implementation, a testament to Workable’s user-friendliness and the well-executed rollout strategy.
Quantifiable Success: Driving Hiring Volume and Efficiency
The impact of Workable’s implementation, initiated in the fall of 2023, was immediate and has demonstrated a compounding positive effect year over year. The shift from a manual, fragmented system to a streamlined, integrated ATS has visibly transformed LandCare’s hiring metrics, proving the tangible return on investment.
Focusing on four core branch-level positions, which represent a significant portion of LandCare’s operational hiring needs, the numbers paint a clear picture of enhanced productivity. In 2023, the last full year operating under the previous UKG plugin system, LandCare successfully hired 122 individuals for these roles. Following the implementation of Workable, that number saw a significant increase, growing to 136 hires in 2024. This upward trajectory continued into 2025, reaching an impressive 138 hires. This sustained growth in hiring volume underscores Workable’s capacity to support and accelerate LandCare’s recruitment efforts, enabling the company to meet its operational demands more effectively.
Even more striking is the improvement in efficiency. From 2024 to 2025, LandCare experienced a remarkable 23% decrease in its time-to-hire metric. This substantial reduction signifies that not only is the company hiring more people, but it is doing so significantly faster, without compromising the quality of candidates reaching hiring managers. In a competitive labor market, reducing time-to-hire is a critical advantage, ensuring that LandCare can onboard essential personnel more quickly and minimize the impact of vacancies on its operations.
Beyond direct hiring metrics, Workable’s influence has also contributed to improved talent retention. While Alex Kline cautiously noted that turnover reduction cannot be attributed to a single factor, he affirmed that the collective benefits of the new system have played a role. The ability to move candidates faster through the pipeline, reach a broader and more diverse pool of applicants, and provide hiring managers with genuine, real-time visibility into their recruitment efforts has collectively fostered better hire quality and stronger retention outcomes across the organization. This suggests a virtuous cycle where efficient, transparent hiring processes lead to more engaged employees and reduced attrition.
Empowering the Field: The Mobile-First Advantage
For a company like LandCare, where a substantial portion of its workforce and, crucially, its hiring managers are frequently away from traditional office settings—on job sites, in company vehicles, or meeting clients—the Workable mobile app has proven to be an indispensable asset. It is not merely a supplementary tool but, in many instances, the primary interface through which hiring managers interact with the recruitment process. In fact, LandCare’s field-based hiring managers utilize the mobile app almost exclusively, a testament to its design and functionality.
The app’s seamless integration into the daily routines of these managers has revolutionized their participation in talent acquisition. When a candidate progresses to a new stage in the workflow, the hiring manager receives an immediate notification via email on their mobile device. From this notification, they can directly click into the Workable app, instantly review the candidate’s resume, and swiftly signal their approval or decline, all without needing to access a laptop or return to a desk. This eliminates previous delays and bottlenecks, ensuring that critical hiring decisions can be made promptly, regardless of the manager’s physical location. This real-time capability is particularly vital in an industry where rapid response can mean the difference between securing a top candidate and losing them to a competitor.
Alex Kline himself leverages the mobile app daily, frequently approving offer letters directly from his phone, further underscoring its utility and convenience for even high-level administrative tasks. He unequivocally highlighted its significance: "That is probably one of the biggest highlights of the system. Our hiring managers — that’s all they use." This mobile-first approach directly addresses one of LandCare’s core operational challenges, empowering its distributed leadership to remain actively engaged in the talent acquisition process with unparalleled flexibility and efficiency.
Enhanced Visibility and Strategic Influence for TA
Beyond the quantifiable improvements in hiring metrics, one of the most significant and perhaps unexpected outcomes of Workable’s implementation has been the profound clarity it has brought to the broader business regarding the true scope and effort involved in talent acquisition. By providing hiring managers with direct access to the platform, they can now transparently view their own job’s pipeline, gaining an intimate understanding of the substantial effort that underpins every successful hire.
A particularly illuminating anecdote underscores this newfound transparency and appreciation. When LandCare’s marketing director posted a role for a graphic designer, she received an overwhelming 2,000 applications within a single month. Witnessing this volume firsthand, and then observing the meticulous process of candidate qualification and progression within Workable, fundamentally altered her perception of the TA team’s work. As Alex Kline recounted, "For her to understand that yes, you may only be seeing five candidates you like to talk to, but this is the level of effort that went into it. Out of 400 candidates, we disqualified 350, scheduled calls with 50, only 30 showed up, we liked 15 of those, 10 made it through the behavioral assessment, and those are your top five."
This unprecedented level of visibility has not only fostered a deeper understanding but has also significantly bolstered the credibility and "street credit" of the TA team within the business. Departments now possess a tangible appreciation for the rigorous, multi-stage process involved in sourcing, screening, and presenting qualified candidates. This transparency has demonstrably strengthened the collaborative relationship between the TA function and the various departments it serves, transforming recruitment from a perceived administrative task into a recognized strategic partnership. Ultimately, this enhanced credibility has elevated the TA function’s standing with leadership, positioning it as a vital strategic arm driving organizational growth and success.
Advanced Analytics and Candidate Experience
Workable’s capabilities extend beyond streamlining day-to-day operations; it also provides robust tools for data analysis and an improved candidate experience. LandCare effectively utilizes Workable’s built-in reporting features for an immediate operational overview, tracking key metrics such as hiring velocity and time-to-hire. These core indicators offer an instant pulse on recruiting performance, enabling the TA team to monitor progress and identify areas for optimization quickly.
However, recognizing the need for deeper, more customized insights, LandCare’s team also leverages Workable’s data integration capabilities. They pull recruitment data directly into Power BI, their corporate analytics environment, where they run highly customized reports through their own data warehouse. This dual approach allows for both quick, native reporting for daily visibility and sophisticated, bespoke analysis to inform long-term strategy. Alex Kline noted, "It’s easy to communicate with the internal mainframe of Workable. We’re able to pull that data into Power BI and run very custom reports." This adaptability in reporting reflects Workable’s flexibility and its capacity to integrate seamlessly into a broader enterprise data strategy.
Beyond internal efficiencies, Workable has also significantly enhanced the candidate experience. Self-scheduling links are a consistently praised feature, with positive feedback frequently received directly from applicants. The ability for candidates to receive a stage-advancement email and immediately book a Teams interview without the cumbersome back-and-forth of traditional scheduling has not only streamlined the process but also created a more professional and positive impression of LandCare. This ease of interaction contributes to a stronger employer brand and a more favorable candidate journey.
Furthermore, custom application questions add a crucial layer of precision to the recruitment process, particularly valuable at LandCare’s scale. The company utilizes these custom fields to gather essential sourcing attribution data from LinkedIn messaging campaigns, providing valuable insights into the effectiveness of various outreach strategies. They also use custom questions to allow intern candidates to indicate their preferred region of the country, enabling efficient routing and prioritization of applicants without adding manual steps to the process. These features collectively ensure that LandCare can gather pertinent information while maintaining a streamlined and candidate-friendly application process.
Broader Implications and Future Outlook
The transformation of LandCare’s talent acquisition strategy through Workable has provided the company with significant strategic advantages, positioning it robustly within the competitive landscape management industry. For field-based organizations managing distributed hiring across dozens of locations, the ability to genuinely engage hiring managers in the recruitment process without extensive training is, in itself, a powerful competitive differentiator. LandCare’s TA team has successfully transitioned from a manual, fragmented system to a nationally coordinated, data-driven recruiting function that can tangibly demonstrate its impact, move candidates through the pipeline with unprecedented speed, and reach talent across more than 15 diverse platforms with a single, efficient action.
The empirical evidence unequivocally tells a compelling story of success: a 23% faster time-to-hire, a robust 138 hires across four core branch positions in a single year (2025), and a talent acquisition team that has not only enhanced operational efficiency but has also earned elevated credibility with leadership. This increased credibility stems directly from the platform’s ability to make the complex and intensive work of talent acquisition transparent and measurable, fostering a deeper appreciation for the TA team’s strategic contribution to LandCare’s overall business objectives.
The implementation of Workable represents more than just a software upgrade for LandCare; it signifies a fundamental shift in how the company approaches talent acquisition, recognizing it as a critical driver of business growth and operational excellence. This modernization ensures that LandCare is well-equipped to attract, secure, and retain the top talent necessary to sustain its leadership position and achieve its ambitious growth targets in the years to come. Asked if LandCare would recommend Workable, the answer is, without question, a resounding affirmative, reflecting the profound and positive impact the platform has had across the organization.
