City Wide Facility Solutions, a venerable third-generation, family-owned building services management company established in 1961, has successfully leveraged its five-year partnership with Workable, a leading applicant tracking system (ATS), to dramatically enhance its talent acquisition processes. Operating across an extensive network of 110 locations throughout the United States and Canada, City Wide manages a comprehensive suite of services, ranging from essential janitorial operations to intricate landscaping, maintenance, and specialized facility management. This expansive operational footprint, coupled with a distinctive B2B model that relies heavily on a robust network of independent contractors, necessitates a highly sophisticated and scalable recruitment infrastructure. The company’s journey with Workable stands as a compelling case study in how strategic technological adoption can centralize and streamline hiring for complex, distributed organizations, leading to remarkable improvements in efficiency, cost-effectiveness, and candidate experience.
A Legacy of Service and the Evolving Recruitment Landscape
Founded over six decades ago, City Wide Facility Solutions has built a formidable reputation on principles of reliability, quality, and personalized service. Its family-owned heritage imbues the company with a long-term vision and a commitment to fostering strong relationships, both with its clients and its vast network of service providers and internal staff. The nature of facility services is inherently dynamic, demanding a diverse range of skills and a consistent influx of talent, from frontline night managers overseeing daily operations to strategic sales executives driving growth and C-suite leadership steering the company’s direction. Annually, City Wide undertakes a significant hiring volume, typically bringing in 30 to 50 new professionals across its franchisee and franchisor operations. This consistent demand for talent, spread across numerous geographical locations and diverse role types, presented a formidable challenge for its human resources and talent acquisition teams, particularly for individuals like Kelsey Herbig, who is at the forefront of the company’s recruitment efforts.
The challenge was not merely about volume but about complexity. A distributed organizational model, while offering agility and localized service delivery, often fragments recruitment efforts. Each location, while part of a larger brand, might historically have operated with varying degrees of autonomy in hiring, leading to inconsistent processes, disparate data, and a lack of centralized oversight. This scenario typically results in inefficiencies, extended time-to-fill metrics, and a diluted candidate experience, all of which can negatively impact an employer’s brand and operational continuity. The pre-existing systems, such as CareerPlug, while functional for a time, began to show limitations as City Wide’s growth accelerated and the demands for a modern, integrated, and highly scalable solution became unequivocally clear. The strategic imperative was to find an ATS that could not only manage the current hiring volume but also support future expansion without incurring prohibitive costs or administrative overhead.
The Strategic Pivot: Identifying a Scalable Solution
Approximately five years ago, City Wide initiated a comprehensive evaluation of available applicant tracking systems. The objective was clear: to replace its existing system, CareerPlug, with a more advanced platform capable of meeting the unique demands of its distributed business model. This strategic review involved a rigorous comparison of several prominent ATS providers, including industry giants like UKG and ADP, alongside specialized solutions such as BambooHR and JazzHR. The selection criteria were multi-faceted, focusing on scalability, user-friendliness, feature sets, integration capabilities, and, critically, pricing structure.
The discerning factor that ultimately led City Wide to select Workable was its distinctive pricing model and unparalleled structural flexibility. In a decentralized operation like City Wide, with 110 distinct locations, the prospect of per-user licensing fees across all departments and individual hiring managers would have escalated costs dramatically, making a unified system financially unviable. Workable’s approach, which allowed for separate user spaces and departmental segmentation without imposing additional per-user charges, presented a "one-stop shop" solution that resonated deeply with City Wide’s operational and financial needs. Kelsey Herbig underscored this pivotal advantage, stating, "We have 110 locations. We needed each person to not have their own platform, but their own user space… A lot of other places will charge you user fees for everybody. Workable is a one-stop shop." This cost-effective scalability was instrumental in consolidating recruitment efforts under a single, cohesive platform, fostering consistency across the entire organization. Beyond pricing, Workable’s robust feature set, including intuitive candidate management, streamlined communication tools, and comprehensive reporting capabilities, further solidified its position as the ideal partner.
Transformative Outcomes: Efficiency, Scalability, and Candidate Experience
The implementation of Workable across City Wide’s vast network proved remarkably seamless. The platform’s user-friendly interface and Workable’s dedicated customer support facilitated a quick and efficient rollout, minimizing disruption and accelerating user adoption. Kelsey Herbig praised the ease of transition, noting, "It was pretty easy. The implementation was great. It was easy to train. Customer service with Workable has been great." This smooth integration laid the groundwork for the transformative results that followed.
Unprecedented Hiring Efficiency: One of the most significant impacts has been the dramatic reduction in time-to-fill, with City Wide now boasting an average time of just 16 days. This figure is notably faster than many industry benchmarks, which often range from 30 to 50 days for similar professional roles. For a company operating in a service-intensive sector, where talent availability directly impacts operational capacity and client satisfaction, this speed is a profound competitive advantage. Faster hiring cycles mean quicker deployment of staff, reduced revenue loss from unfilled positions, and a more agile response to market demands. The ability to fill roles in just over two weeks ensures that City Wide can maintain optimal staffing levels, thereby upholding its commitment to service excellence.
Robust Scalability and Cost Control: Workable’s design has enabled City Wide to manage its extensive network of 110 franchise locations with distinct departments and user spaces under a single, unified system. This architectural strength has eliminated the need for costly per-user fees, representing substantial savings for an organization of City Wide’s scale. The centralization of the hiring system also provides leadership with a holistic view of recruitment activities, enabling better strategic planning, resource allocation, and adherence to company-wide hiring standards. This unified approach mitigates the risks associated with disparate systems, such as data silos, inconsistent processes, and compliance challenges, which are common pitfalls for geographically dispersed enterprises.
Elevated Candidate Experience and Employer Branding: In today’s competitive talent market, the candidate experience is paramount. Workable has empowered City Wide to maintain a best-in-class communication standard, ensuring 100% applicant response rates through automated and scheduled communication features. This commitment to acknowledging every applicant, regardless of the outcome, significantly strengthens City Wide’s employer brand. Candidates who receive timely and professional communication, even rejection notices, are more likely to view the company favorably, potentially applying for future roles or recommending City Wide to others. This positive perception is invaluable in an era where employer reviews on platforms like Glassdoor and social media can profoundly influence recruitment success. The scheduled email functionality within Workable prevents inbox overload for recruiters while ensuring a consistent, professional, and timely communication flow.
Streamlined, End-to-End Workflow: Workable has consolidated various critical hiring processes, including assessments, offer letter generation, and background checks, directly within its platform. This integration has created a truly streamlined, end-to-end hiring workflow, eliminating the need for manual data transfer between multiple systems and reducing administrative burden. Recruiters like Kelsey Herbig save considerable time on backend tasks, such as coordinating interviews, by leveraging Workable’s scheduling features. "I love the feature that I can send a calendar invite and it goes to myself and my hiring team. It keeps me from having to do an extra step," she stated. This automation frees up valuable time for recruiters to focus on strategic sourcing, candidate engagement, and building talent pipelines, rather than being bogged down by repetitive administrative duties.
Inside Workable’s Sourcing Advantage: Indeed Talent Scout
City Wide’s partnership with Workable extended to being a beta partner for Indeed Talent Scout, an integrated sourcing tool within the ATS. This early adoption yielded immediate and tangible value, particularly for hard-to-fill roles. Kelsey Herbig enthusiastically recounted, "I loved it. I hired an account manager in seven days off of it." This rapid success highlights the power of proactive sourcing integrated directly into the recruitment workflow.
Indeed Talent Scout proved especially effective for positions that traditionally struggle for visibility on professional networking sites like LinkedIn, such as night managers. These operational roles often attract candidates who are more active on job boards like Indeed. Herbig noted, "Night managers are the hardest job to fill… Talent Scout is awesome because those people aren’t on LinkedIn. They’re on Indeed." The tool allowed City Wide to:
- Directly Contact Candidates: Enabling proactive outreach to passive candidates who might not be actively applying but possess the desired skills and experience.
- Target Specific Talent Pools: Focusing on candidates relevant to the unique demands of facility services, particularly those for field and operational roles.
- Accelerate Time-to-Hire for Critical Positions: Expediting the sourcing phase, which is often the most time-consuming part of the recruitment process for specialized roles.
As a result, Indeed Talent Scout has become an indispensable component of Kelsey Herbig’s sourcing toolkit, regularly utilized to identify and engage qualified candidates for City Wide’s diverse hiring needs.
Broader Strategic Implications and Future Outlook
The five-year alliance between City Wide Facility Solutions and Workable transcends mere operational efficiency; it represents a strategic advantage in a competitive market. By optimizing its talent acquisition functions, City Wide has not only streamlined its internal processes but also bolstered its capacity for growth and service delivery. The ability to consistently attract, assess, and onboard talent efficiently across 110 locations provides a robust foundation for continued expansion, ensuring that the company can meet increasing client demands and maintain its high standards of service quality.
For other companies, particularly those in the facility services, building maintenance, or any distributed operations sector, City Wide’s success with Workable offers a compelling blueprint. It underscores the critical importance of investing in scalable, integrated ATS solutions that can adapt to complex organizational structures and diverse hiring needs. The benefits extend beyond cost savings and faster hiring; they encompass enhanced employer branding, improved candidate experience, and ultimately, a stronger, more agile workforce.
Kelsey Herbig’s unequivocal recommendation of Workable, delivered with a jovial remark about earning a referral bonus, speaks volumes about the platform’s impact. As City Wide Facility Solutions continues its trajectory of growth across the U.S. and Canada, its enduring partnership with Workable ensures that its talent acquisition remains a strategic asset, driving efficiency, fostering positive candidate relationships, and underpinning the company’s long-term success. This collaboration exemplifies how technology, when strategically deployed, can transform human capital management into a powerful engine for organizational excellence and sustained competitive advantage.
