Atlanta, GA – [Date of Publication, e.g., October 26, 2025] – LandCare, a prominent national commercial landscape management company operating across 23 states with 76 locations, has undergone a significant transformation in its talent acquisition strategy, leveraging Workable’s applicant tracking system (ATS) to streamline hiring processes, boost efficiency, and elevate the strategic importance of its recruitment function. The implementation, completed in late 2023, has yielded measurable improvements, including a 23% reduction in time-to-hire and a substantial increase in hiring volume for critical branch-level positions, fundamentally reshaping how the company attracts and secures its approximately 4,000 peak-season employees.
The Challenge for a National Landscape Leader: Navigating a Distributed Workforce
LandCare stands as a titan in the commercial landscape management sector, a demanding industry characterized by diverse roles ranging from skilled field crews to sophisticated corporate functions. With 76 branches spread across nearly half of the United States, the company’s operational model necessitates a robust, adaptable talent acquisition strategy capable of supporting a highly distributed and often field-based workforce. The complexity is amplified by the sheer volume of hiring required, especially during peak seasons when the employee count swells to around 4,000. These roles span the organizational chart, including critical branch administrators, production managers, account managers, and branch managers, alongside corporate functions in finance, IT, HR, marketing, and operations, and periodic executive-level searches. Crucially, crew-level hiring, which forms the backbone of the company’s service delivery, is managed at the individual branch level, requiring guidance and support from a centralized talent acquisition team.
Prior to integrating Workable, LandCare’s recruitment infrastructure presented considerable challenges. The company relied on a plugin within its existing UKG human resources information system (HRIS), a solution described by Alex Kline, LandCare’s Director of Talent Acquisition and Employee Services, as "antiquated." This system functioned primarily as a processing tool rather than a comprehensive ATS, lacking the sophisticated features and automation essential for modern, high-volume recruitment. The process was heavily manual, limited in scope, and proved increasingly inadequate as LandCare pursued aggressive growth targets.
A major pain point was job posting. The UKG integration could only push job roles to LandCare’s internal careers page. To reach a broader pool of candidates on popular platforms like LinkedIn or Indeed, recruiters were forced to undertake separate, manual postings for each individual role on every desired job board. This laborious and time-consuming process created significant bottlenecks, hindering the company’s ability to respond swiftly to talent needs across its vast network of branches. As LandCare continued to scale, the inherent inefficiencies of this fragmented approach became unsustainable, signaling an urgent need for a dedicated, integrated, and user-friendly applicant tracking system.
The Strategic Quest for a Modern ATS: Prioritizing User Experience for Field Operations
Recognizing the critical need for an overhaul, Alex Kline spearheaded a comprehensive and deliberate evaluation process. His team meticulously assessed approximately ten different ATS platforms, systematically narrowing the field down to five, then three, and finally two leading contenders. This rigorous selection process underscored LandCare’s commitment to finding a solution that not only met the technical requirements of a large-scale enterprise but also aligned seamlessly with its unique operational environment.
The final selection hinged on a crucial understanding of LandCare’s operational reality: many of its hiring managers are field-based, spending their days on job sites, in vehicles, and away from traditional office desks. While one of the competing finalists offered robust reporting capabilities and a suite of tools appealing to dedicated talent acquisition professionals, it lacked the intuitive, accessible interface necessary to engage LandCare’s geographically dispersed and often mobile hiring managers.
Kline articulated this critical differentiator, stating, "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 insight proved pivotal. Workable distinguished itself by combining the functional depth required for comprehensive talent acquisition management with an unparalleled user experience designed for simplicity and accessibility. The platform’s ability to deliver essential reporting and advanced features without overwhelming non-technical users, particularly those operating in the field, was the decisive factor. It offered a pragmatic balance, ensuring that both the core TA team could execute sophisticated strategies and that field managers could actively participate in the hiring process with minimal friction or training.
A Phased Rollout for Seamless Integration and Rapid Adoption
With Workable selected, Alex Kline assumed the role of project manager for the implementation, collaborating closely with Workable’s dedicated implementation partner, Kashaw. This strategic approach involved a phased rollout, deliberately delegating specific components to relevant teams to ensure a smooth and efficient transition. The TA team, for instance, focused on building out a comprehensive library of candidate communication templates, standardizing outreach and enhancing the candidate experience. Simultaneously, the HR team meticulously aligned the organizational structure within Workable with the company’s existing HRIS, ensuring seamless data flow and logical candidate progression across both systems.
This collaborative and methodical approach fostered a highly symbiotic relationship between LandCare’s internal teams and Workable’s implementation specialists. Kline noted the responsiveness and efficacy of this partnership: "We’d bring things to their attention in the afternoon and come back the next morning to viable solutions." This agile problem-solving mechanism minimized delays and optimized the configuration of the new system to LandCare’s specific needs.
The effectiveness of this phased implementation was evident in the rapid adoption rates. The core Talent Acquisition team became fully operational on Workable within a remarkably swift six weeks. Following a two-week period of internal usage to fine-tune workflows, document edge cases, and ensure system stability, the platform was then launched to the broader business. This strategic internal testing period proved invaluable, allowing the TA team to address any unforeseen issues before wider deployment. Consequently, full company adoption of Workable was achieved within an impressive eight weeks of the initial implementation, a testament to the platform’s intuitive design and the well-executed rollout strategy.
Quantifiable Impact: Driving Efficiency, Growth, and Quality
The implementation of Workable in the fall of 2023 marked an immediate and sustained positive impact on LandCare’s hiring operations, demonstrating compounding benefits year over year. A focused analysis of four core branch-level positions reveals a clear upward trend in recruitment volume:
- 2023 (last full year on UKG): 122 hires
- 2024 (first full year with Workable): 136 hires
- 2025: 138 hires
This consistent growth in hiring volume underscores Workable’s ability to facilitate a more efficient and expansive recruitment effort, enabling LandCare to meet its staffing needs more effectively as the company expands.
Beyond sheer volume, the efficiency gains were particularly striking in the time-to-hire metric. From 2024 to 2025, LandCare achieved a significant 23% decrease in time-to-hire. This acceleration in the recruitment cycle is critical for a company operating in a competitive industry where skilled talent can be quickly snapped up. Faster hiring means less operational downtime, quicker integration of new team members, and enhanced service delivery capacity. Importantly, this speed was not achieved at the expense of quality. The consistent feedback indicates that the quality of candidates reaching hiring managers remained high, a crucial factor in maintaining LandCare’s operational standards.
Furthermore, the implementation of Workable has contributed to an improvement in employee turnover rates. While Alex Kline prudently noted that turnover reduction is seldom attributable to a single factor, he highlighted that the cumulative effect of faster hiring, broader candidate reach, and enhanced visibility for hiring managers has undeniably contributed to better hire quality and stronger retention outcomes across the organization. This suggests a virtuous cycle where an optimized recruitment process leads to better cultural fit and more engaged employees, ultimately fostering a more stable and productive workforce.
Elevating Talent Acquisition’s Strategic Role: Visibility and Credibility
One of the most profound and perhaps unexpected outcomes of Workable’s integration was the increased clarity and appreciation it brought to the entire business regarding the intricate work performed by the Talent Acquisition team. By providing hiring managers direct access to the platform, they gained unprecedented visibility into the recruitment pipeline for their own job openings. This transparency illuminated the extensive effort involved in every successful hire.
A particularly illustrative example involved LandCare’s marketing director who posted a graphic designer role and was confronted with an astonishing 2,000 applications in a single month. Witnessing this volume firsthand dramatically shifted her perception of the TA team’s workload and expertise. As 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 granular insight into the screening, qualification, and assessment stages provided tangible evidence of the value-added services delivered by the TA team.
This newfound transparency has been instrumental in strengthening the collaborative relationship between the Talent Acquisition department and the various business units it serves. It has fostered a deeper understanding of the complexities of talent acquisition and, critically, has elevated the function’s credibility with senior leadership. The TA team is no longer perceived merely as an administrative support function but as a strategic partner, capable of delivering measurable results and providing valuable insights into the talent market.
Workable’s Key Features in Action: Enabling Agility and Precision
The success of Workable at LandCare is deeply rooted in several key features that directly address the company’s unique operational challenges and strategic objectives:
1. One Click, 15+ Job Boards: Amplified Reach and Brand Awareness
The shift from manual, platform-specific job postings to Workable’s automated distribution system has been transformative. What once required tedious, repetitive tasks now takes a single action, pushing job roles to over 15 diverse job boards simultaneously. While LinkedIn and Indeed remain primary candidate sources, this broader distribution significantly enhances LandCare’s brand visibility across the talent market. Alex Kline emphasized this dual benefit: "Just having your brand out there in all the different areas ultimately drives applicants to you in other ways as well." This expansive reach not only increases the volume of applications but also reinforces LandCare’s presence as an employer of choice in a competitive industry.
2. The Mobile App: Tailored for the Field-Based Workforce
For a company whose hiring managers are frequently on job sites, operating equipment, or in transit, the Workable mobile app has emerged as a cornerstone of its recruitment efficiency. Indeed, hiring managers at LandCare utilize the mobile app almost exclusively, reflecting its intuitive design and seamless functionality. When a candidate progresses to a new stage in the workflow, the hiring manager receives an immediate email notification on their smartphone. From there, they can click directly into Workable, review the candidate’s resume, and provide instant approval or rejection. This eliminates the need for a laptop or a return to a desk, removing significant delays and ensuring that critical hiring decisions can be made on the go. Alex Kline himself relies on the mobile app daily, approving offer letters and maintaining operational flow from his phone. He unequivocally states, "That is probably one of the biggest highlights of the system. Our hiring managers – that’s all they use."
3. Robust and Adaptable Reporting: Data-Driven Decision Making
Workable’s reporting capabilities provide LandCare with both immediate operational insights and the flexibility for in-depth strategic analysis. The built-in reporting features offer quick views of essential metrics such as hiring velocity and time-to-hire, providing an instant pulse on recruitment performance. For more sophisticated analysis, the team can seamlessly pull Workable’s raw data directly into Power BI, integrating it with their custom data warehouse. This capability allows LandCare to run highly customized reports, enabling deeper dives into talent trends, sourcing effectiveness, and recruitment ROI. This adaptability underscores Workable’s ability to support both day-to-day tactical operations and long-term strategic planning, providing actionable intelligence to leadership.
4. Enhanced Candidate Experience: Self-Scheduling and Custom Questions
The candidate experience has also seen marked improvements, particularly through Workable’s self-scheduling links. This feature, consistently praised by candidates, allows them to immediately book a Teams interview upon receiving a stage-advancement email, eliminating the frustrating back-and-forth typical of traditional scheduling. This not only streamlines the process but also conveys a sense of efficiency and respect for the candidate’s time.
Additionally, custom application questions provide a layer of precision crucial for a company of LandCare’s scale and diversity. These questions are leveraged for various practical purposes, such as gathering sourcing attribution data from LinkedIn messaging campaigns or allowing intern candidates to specify their preferred region of the country. This targeted information helps to efficiently route and prioritize candidates, reducing manual screening efforts and improving the relevance of candidate pools.
Broader Implications for LandCare and the Industry
LandCare’s journey with Workable is a compelling case study in how strategic investment in talent acquisition technology can profoundly impact a large, distributed organization. The success achieved extends beyond mere operational efficiency; it underpins LandCare’s broader business strategy and competitive advantage in the landscape management industry. By shortening the time-to-hire, the company can more rapidly deploy skilled labor, respond to client demands, and seize growth opportunities. The improved quality of hires and enhanced retention contribute directly to service excellence and client satisfaction, reinforcing LandCare’s market position.
This transformation also highlights a broader trend in talent acquisition, particularly for industries with significant field-based workforces. The reliance on mobile-first solutions, intuitive interfaces, and robust data analytics is no longer a luxury but a necessity. Companies that can effectively engage their field managers in the hiring process, empower their TA teams with efficient tools, and leverage data for strategic decision-making will be better positioned to attract, develop, and retain the talent critical for sustained success. LandCare’s experience demonstrates that the right technology, coupled with a thoughtful implementation strategy, can move talent acquisition from a transactional function to a strategic imperative, yielding tangible benefits across the entire enterprise.
Conclusion: A Resounding Endorsement for Workable’s Impact
When asked if LandCare would recommend Workable, the answer is an unequivocal "Without question." The evidence speaks for itself: a 23% faster time-to-hire, 138 hires across four core branch positions in a single year, and a Talent Acquisition team that has gained unprecedented credibility and influence within the organization. Workable has empowered LandCare to transcend the limitations of manual, fragmented processes, transforming its recruitment function into a nationally coordinated, data-driven operation. For field-based organizations managing distributed hiring across numerous locations, the ability to genuinely engage hiring managers without extensive training is, as LandCare has demonstrated, a competitive advantage that directly fuels business growth and operational excellence. The platform has not only made the work of talent acquisition more efficient but also more visible, proving its indispensable value to LandCare’s leadership and its thousands of employees.
