How LandCare cut time to hire by 23% and scaled recruiting across 76 locations

Who Is LandCare?

LandCare is a national commercial landscape management company with 76 locations across 23 states. At peak season, the organization employs approximately 4,000 people, making it one of the larger field-based workforces in the industry. Managing talent acquisition for the entire organization is Alex Kline, Director of Talent Acquisition and Employee Services, who leads a team of six recruiters handling exempt-level, corporate, and executive hiring while also serving as subject matter experts and advisors to branches managing their own crew-level recruiting.

The roles LandCare hires for span branch administrators, production managers, account managers, branch managers, corporate functions including finance, IT, HR, marketing, and operations, and periodic executive searches at the VP and director level. Crew-level hiring is managed at the branch level, with LandCare’s TA team providing guidance and ensuring postings reach the right candidates. Workable is used throughout the entire organization.

Quick Results

Hiring Before Workable

Before Workable, LandCare was not using a dedicated applicant tracking system. Recruiting ran through a UKG plugin that functioned more as a processing tool than a true ATS — manual, limited in scope, and incapable of supporting the kind of efficient, high-volume hiring the company needed as it scaled.

“It was a very antiquated process. 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.”

Job postings were a particular pain point. The UKG integration pushed roles only to LandCare’s careers page. Each additional platform — LinkedIn, Indeed — required a separate, manual post. As the organization grew and hiring velocity became increasingly important, that inefficiency was no longer sustainable.

Alex evaluated approximately 10 different platforms before narrowing the field to five, then three, then two. The selection process was thorough and deliberate and Workable emerged as the clear choice.

Why Workable Won

The competing finalist had features that excited the recruiting team — robust reporting capabilities and a range of tools that appeal to talent acquisition professionals. But LandCare’s model presented a different challenge. Hiring managers at LandCare are frequently in the field, not behind desks. Getting them genuinely engaged in the hiring process required a platform they could use from anywhere, with minimal onboarding.

“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.”

Workable offered the reporting capabilities LandCare needed while delivering a user experience that field-based hiring managers could actually adopt. Thr combination of functional depth without complexity is what carried the decision.

A Phased Implementation Built for Scale

Alex led the implementation personally, functioning as the project manager for the rollout and working closely with Workable’s implementation partner, Kashaw. Rather than trying to manage every element simultaneously, Alex delegated components deliberately: the TA team built out candidate communication templates, the HR team aligned the organizational structure in Workable with the company’s HRIS so that candidate flow made sense across both systems.

“The relationship was very symbiotic. We’d bring things to their attention in the afternoon and come back the next morning to viable solutions.”

The result was a phased rollout that worked. The TA team was fully operational on Workable within six weeks. After two weeks of internal use to work out workflow details and document edge cases, the platform launched to the broader business. Full company adoption was achieved within eight weeks of initial implementation.

Visibility That Gave TA a Seat at the Table

One of the more unexpected outcomes of Workable’s implementation was the clarity it brought to the business about what talent acquisition actually does. Because hiring managers now have access to the platform and can see their own job’s pipeline, they can see exactly how much effort goes into every hire.

When LandCare’s marketing director posted a graphic designer role and received 2,000 applications in a single month, it changed her understanding of the TA team’s work entirely.

“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. It really gave the TA team a lot of street credit in the business.”

That transparency has strengthened the relationship between TA and the departments they serve, and elevated the function’s credibility with leadership.

Hiring Growth You Can Measure

Workable was implemented in the fall of 2023. The impact on hiring volume was immediate and has compounded year over year. Looking at four core branch-level positions, LandCare hired 122 people in 2023 — the last full year on UKG. In 2024, that number grew to 136. In 2025, it reached 138.

Time to hire moved in the other direction. From 2024 to 2025, LandCares time to hire decreased by 23%. More people hired, faster, while maintaining the quality of candidates reaching hiring managers.

Turnover has also improved since implementation. While Alex did not attribute the reduction to a single factor, the ability to move faster, reach more candidates, and give hiring managers genuine visibility into their own pipelines has contributed to better hire quality and stronger retention outcomes overall.

One Click, 15 Job Boards

The operational shift in job posting alone has had a meaningful impact on how LandCare recruits. Where UKG’s plugin pushed roles only to the company’s careers page and required separate manual posts to every other platform, Workable distributes to 15-plus job boards with a single action.

LinkedIn and Indeed remain the primary candidate sources, but the broader distribution carries a brand awareness benefit that Alex values beyond raw application numbers.

“Just having your brand out there in all the different areas ultimately drives applicants to you in other ways as well.”

The Mobile App: Built for the Field

For a company whose hiring managers are frequently on job sites, in trucks, and away from any desk, the Workable mobile app is the primary interface. In fact, hiring managers at LandCare use the mobile app almost exclusively.

When a candidate moves to a new stage in the workflow, the hiring manager receives an email on their phone, can click directly into Workable, review the resume, and signal approval or pass immediately. No laptop required. No delay waiting until someone is back at a desk.

Alex uses the mobile app daily as well, approving offer letters from his phone regularly.

“That is probably one of the biggest highlights of the system. Our hiring managers — that’s all they use.”

Reporting That Travels Outside the Platform

LandCare uses Workable’s built-in reporting for a quick operational view — hiring velocity, time to hire, and other core metrics that provide an immediate pulse on recruiting performance. But the team also pulls Workable’s data directly into Power BI, running custom reports through their own data warehouse.

“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.”

The ability to use Workable’s native reporting for day-to-day visibility while integrating with a more sophisticated analytics environment reflects the kind of adaptability that made Workable the right fit for LandCare’s model.

Self-Scheduling and Custom Questions

Self-scheduling links are a consistently praised feature at LandCare, with positive feedback coming directly from candidates. The experience of receiving a stage-advancement email and being able to book a Teams interview immediately, without back-and-forth, has meaningfully improved the candidate experience.

Custom application questions add a layer of precision that matters at scale. LandCare uses them to gather sourcing attribution data from LinkedIn messaging campaigns and to allow intern candidates to indicate which region of the country they are interested in — practical information that helps route and prioritize candidates without adding manual steps.

Would LandCare Recommend Workable?

Without question.

For field-based organizations managing distributed hiring across dozens of locations, the ability to get hiring managers genuinely engaged in the process without extensive training is a competitive advantage in itself. LandCare’s TA team has grown from a manual, limited system to a nationally coordinated recruiting function that can demonstrate its impact with data, move candidates faster, and reach talent across 15-plus platforms with a single click.

The numbers tell the story: 23% faster time to hire, 138 hires in a single year, and a team that has earned credibility with leadership because the platform made the work visible.