Ascent Programs, the corporate entity overseeing a vital network of residential and wilderness treatment programs for teens and young adults across Utah, has successfully revolutionized its hiring operations through the strategic implementation of Workable, a comprehensive applicant tracking system. This transformative shift has addressed long-standing challenges associated with decentralized hiring practices, ushering in an era of unprecedented efficiency, standardization, and data-driven strategic insight across its six program sites and a workforce exceeding 600 employees. The transition, which began with a pilot program at Three Peaks Ascent, has culminated in full platform adoption within a year, demonstrating significant improvements in time-to-hire, candidate quality, and corporate reporting capabilities, ultimately bolstering the organization’s capacity to deliver critical care.
Ascent Programs: A Mission-Critical Network
Ascent Programs operates at the forefront of specialized mental and behavioral health services, providing crucial support through its network of residential and wilderness treatment programs. These programs are designed to assist adolescents and young adults navigating complex challenges, offering therapeutic interventions in structured and immersive environments. The success of such programs hinges critically on the quality and availability of staff, encompassing a diverse range of roles from direct residential care providers to highly specialized licensed therapists and certified teachers.
The organizational structure is complex, with HR operations managed at a corporate level by individuals like Jodi Levie, who oversees corporate hiring while collaborating closely with embedded HR directors at each individual program site. This hybrid model necessitates a delicate balance between localized operational flexibility and enterprise-wide consistency—a balance that proved elusive prior to the Workable integration. The roles Ascent recruits for span the entire spectrum of clinical and residential care: admissions teams crucial for client intake, therapists pivotal for caseload management and quality care delivery, and residential staff who represent the highest-volume hiring need and, given the demanding nature of their direct, continuous client interaction, often present the highest turnover challenge. Furthermore, securing specialized professionals, such as licensed therapists and certified educators, introduces additional layers of complexity, particularly in tight labor markets or when specific credentials are non-negotiable.
The Pre-Workable Landscape: A Decentralized Quagmire
Before the advent of Workable, Ascent Programs’ hiring infrastructure was profoundly decentralized, characterized by fragmented processes and a significant lack of overarching visibility. Each of the six program sites operated autonomously, with individual HR directors managing their own recruitment lifecycles. This included everything from drafting and posting job advertisements, primarily through individual Indeed accounts, to coordinating interviews and managing candidate communications independently. The absence of a shared platform meant there was no unified data repository, no standardized workflows, and, critically, no corporate-level insight into the organization’s hiring performance.
The consequences of this fragmented approach were manifold and directly impacted operational efficiency and strategic planning. The hiring process was inherently slower, as the administrative burden for each hire rested solely on individual HR personnel. Interview questions and evaluation criteria varied significantly across sites, making it impossible to ensure consistent, equitable, or legally defensible hiring decisions. Collaboration between HR teams and clinical or operational managers was limited, hindering a holistic approach to staffing needs. Perhaps most detrimental was the complete absence of data. When specific hiring challenges emerged—whether an isolated issue at a particular site or a systemic problem across the organization—there was no objective data to diagnose the root cause or inform a targeted response. Jodi Levie succinctly articulated this deficiency: "There was no visibility at the corporate level. We weren’t able to report on anything." This data vacuum rendered it impossible for Ascent to develop a proactive, data-driven hiring strategy essential for its growth and scalability. For instance, determining whether a difficulty in filling a particular role stemmed from a flawed internal process or broader market conditions was purely speculative, hindering effective problem-solving and strategic resource allocation.
The Catalyst for Change: Seeking Visibility and Accountability
The decision to seek a unified hiring solution was driven by two paramount corporate priorities: enhancing visibility and ensuring accountability. Ascent’s leadership recognized the imperative to present hiring performance to its board of directors not merely as anecdotal observations but as quantifiable data, reflecting a commitment to modern corporate governance and strategic oversight. Concurrently, the organization needed a robust platform capable of introducing consistency and standardization into a hiring process that, by its very nature, spanned multiple independent operational sites.
The implementation journey commenced strategically with a pilot program at Three Peaks Ascent, the organization’s wilderness program. This controlled rollout allowed the team to assess the platform’s efficacy and gather initial feedback before a broader deployment. For Jodi Levie and her team, the critical evaluation criteria centered on two pillars: ease of implementation and demonstrable organizational impact. Workable, they found, delivered unequivocally on both fronts. Early adopters within the HR teams quickly recognized the potential for significant time savings, a compelling benefit that resonated across the organization. This tangible value proposition fostered organic adoption, bypassing the need for a top-down mandate. "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," Levie noted, highlighting the power of user experience in driving widespread acceptance.
A pivotal factor in accelerating platform adoption was the deliberate decision to extend hiring team access beyond the confines of HR departments. By empowering more employees—including hiring managers and team leads—with visibility into candidates for their respective teams and a voice in the selection process, Ascent cultivated a sense of ownership. This approach transformed platform adoption from a mere policy directive into a recognized benefit, fostering greater engagement and ensuring the system became an integral part of daily operational workflows.
Transforming Hiring: Key Metrics and Outcomes
The integration of Workable has yielded rapid and quantifiable results across several critical areas, fundamentally reshaping Ascent Programs’ recruitment landscape.
- Time Savings: A significant estimated saving of 3 to 5 hours per hire has been achieved. Across an organization with over 600 employees and a continuous need for staffing across six sites, this translates into thousands of hours annually, substantially reducing the administrative burden on HR teams. This freed-up capacity allows HR professionals to focus on more strategic initiatives, such as talent development, employee engagement, and long-term workforce planning, rather than being bogged down by manual recruitment tasks.
- Enhanced Visibility: Workable introduced corporate-level reporting where none previously existed. This newfound capability means that leadership and the board of directors now receive regular, data-driven updates on hiring performance, including key metrics like time-to-hire, source of hire, and candidate pipeline status. This transparency supports more informed decision-making at the highest levels of the organization.
- Standardization: The platform enabled the creation of consistent interview workflows and question sets across all programs. This ensures that every candidate for a specific role, regardless of the program site, undergoes the same evaluation process, leading to more equitable and defensible hiring decisions and significantly reducing compliance risks.
- Improved Candidate Quality: Hiring teams consistently report seeing a higher caliber of qualified applicants. This improvement is attributed to Workable’s multi-board job distribution, which expands candidate pools by reaching a wider audience, and the structured evaluation process that helps identify the best-fit candidates earlier in the pipeline.
- Scalability: The successful expansion from a single pilot program to all six sites within a year underscores Workable’s scalability. It now provides a unified hiring infrastructure capable of supporting a large and growing organization, ensuring consistent recruitment practices across its entire 600+ employee base.
- High Adoption: Full platform adoption across all sites within one year is a testament to the platform’s user-friendliness and perceived value. HR directors and hiring managers now operate from a single source of truth, eliminating fragmented data and ensuring synchronized recruitment efforts.
Standardization That Protects and Improves
One of the most profound shifts facilitated by Workable has been the establishment of structured and consistent hiring practices across all six Ascent programs. Prior to this, there was no mechanism to guarantee that a therapist candidate applying to one program was being evaluated against the same criteria as a therapist candidate at another. This inconsistency posed significant risks, not only to the quality of hires but also to compliance and equity.
With Workable, Ascent has meticulously designed role-specific workflows and comprehensive interview question sets for every position type. This ranges from high-volume residential staff roles to complex clinical positions requiring multiple stages of evaluation, including credential verification and specialized interviews. Consequently, every candidate applying for the same role now progresses through an identical process, is posed the same set of questions, and is assessed against uniform criteria.
The implications of this standardization extend far beyond mere efficiency. It substantially mitigates the risk of inconsistency-driven compliance issues, such as unconscious bias or allegations of discriminatory practices. By ensuring that hiring decisions are predicated on a defensible and equitable basis, Ascent fortifies its operational integrity and upholds its commitment to fair employment practices. Levie underscored this critical benefit: "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." The platform’s flexibility to customize workflows by role—adding necessary steps for intricate clinical hires while maintaining a streamlined process for higher-volume residential roles—has allowed Ascent to achieve standardization without sacrificing the nuanced requirements inherent in different positions. This adaptability is crucial for an organization managing such a diverse array of specialized roles within a sensitive care environment.
Reporting That Finally Reaches the Boardroom
Perhaps the most strategically transformative impact for Ascent has been the newfound capability for robust, data-driven reporting. In the pre-Workable era, the organization simply lacked reliable hiring data. Today, the corporate HR team meticulously tracks essential metrics such as time-to-hire, the volume of qualified candidates, and the source of successful hires across all six programs. This rich dataset now informs critical decisions at both operational and strategic levels.
Jodi Levie describes the reporting features as "easy to use," a testament to Workable’s intuitive design. Beyond retrospective analysis, the team has also discovered immense value in the platform’s predictive reporting functionality. This feature helps identify emergent patterns in application flow, enabling HR to discern whether a site’s difficulty in filling a particular role reflects a temporary market fluctuation or signals a deeper issue warranting a more targeted intervention. This proactive insight is invaluable for resource allocation and strategic planning.
"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," Levie articulated, emphasizing the profound shift. This transition from reliance on instinct and anecdote to evidence-based strategy represents a significant elevation of the HR function within Ascent. It transforms HR from an administrative support unit into a strategic contributor, actively shaping the organization’s growth trajectory and operational resilience.
Speed and Quality Without Sacrifice
For an organization like Ascent, where staffing levels directly correlate with client capacity and the ability to provide care, the agility to scale hiring rapidly in response to demand spikes is an operational imperative. When new clients are admitted into a program, the need to hire qualified staff to match that capacity becomes immediate and critical. Workable provides the essential infrastructure to achieve this speed without compromising the quality or integrity of the recruitment process.
The platform’s efficiencies result in an estimated saving of three to five hours per hire, encompassing time typically spent on candidate research, outreach, and coordination. Workable’s multi-board job distribution feature ensures that open roles reach a vast candidate pool across numerous platforms without the laborious, manual posting on each site individually. Furthermore, features like self-scheduling for interviews and integrated candidate texting have significantly streamlined communication, making the process more efficient for both applicants and hiring teams. Ascent is also actively expanding its utilization of automated messaging workflows to inject even greater consistency and speed into candidate communication, ensuring timely updates and engagement throughout the hiring journey.
Crucially, the operational improvements have not come at the expense of quality. Hiring teams across all six programs consistently report an increase in the number of qualified applicants. This enhanced quality is a direct consequence of both broader job distribution, attracting a more diverse and skilled talent pool, and the more structured evaluation processes that effectively filter for cultural fit and specific competencies earlier in the recruitment pipeline.
A Candidate Experience That Works
From the candidate’s perspective, the application experience with Ascent Programs, powered by Workable, is remarkably seamless. Whether an applicant discovers a role through popular job boards like Indeed, directly via Ascent’s careers page, or through referral channels, their information is routed efficiently and directly into Workable. This centralized data management eliminates the need for HR teams to juggle multiple platforms or reconcile disparate data, ensuring all candidate information resides in a single, accessible location.
Levie highlighted the simplicity: "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." The application process itself has been devoid of friction, with candidates finding it straightforward and user-friendly. The organization has reported no significant complaints regarding the candidate experience, indicating that the technology supports a positive and professional first impression for potential employees.
Looking Ahead: Strategic Growth and Continuous Improvement
As Three Peaks Ascent and its sister programs continue their trajectory of growth, Ascent Programs is committed to a deliberate expansion of its utilization of Workable’s advanced capabilities. Future plans include a deeper integration of automated messaging and AI screening functionalities. These enhancements aim to refine existing workflows, making them even more intentional and maximizing the return on the robust infrastructure already in place. AI screening, for instance, could further streamline the initial review of high-volume applications, quickly identifying candidates with specific credentials or experience vital for clinical roles, thereby allowing human recruiters to focus on more nuanced evaluations. Automated messaging can ensure personalized and timely communication at every stage of the candidate journey, enhancing engagement and reducing drop-off rates.
For an organization managing critical clinical hiring at scale, where the caliber of every hire directly impacts the well-being and therapeutic progress of the vulnerable teens and young adults they serve, this commitment to continuous improvement is not merely incidental; it is fundamental to their mission. The quality of care, the safety of the environment, and the efficacy of treatment programs are inextricably linked to having a highly qualified, dedicated, and stable workforce.
Workable has provided Ascent Programs with a foundational triad: unparalleled visibility into hiring operations, robust standardization across diverse program sites, and significantly enhanced speed in recruitment processes. Building upon this solid foundation, the Ascent team is actively cultivating a hiring function that is genuinely strategic, agile, and fully capable of serving both the organization’s ambitious growth objectives and its overarching, life-changing mission. This strategic evolution in HR practices positions Ascent Programs as a leader not just in specialized treatment, but also in modern, ethical, and efficient talent acquisition within the demanding healthcare sector.
