How Ascent Programs standardized hiring across six sites and saved hours per hire with Workable

Quick Results

Who Is Ascent Programs?

Ascent Programs is the corporate organization behind a network of residential and wilderness treatment programs serving teens and young adults across Utah. Three Peaks Ascent, the organization’s wilderness program, was the first site to implement Workable. Today, the platform supports all six programs with a workforce of more than 600 employees.

Overseeing HR operations at the corporate level is Jodi Levie, who manages hiring for the corporate office while working closely with HR directors embedded at each program site. It is a structure that demands both local flexibility and enterprise-wide consistency — two things that proved difficult to achieve before Workable.

The roles Ascent hires for span the full spectrum of clinical and residential care. Admissions teams are essential to bringing clients into programs. Therapists are critical to maintaining caseloads and delivering quality care. Residential staff, who work directly and continuously with clients, represent the organization’s highest-volume hiring need and, given the demands of the work, its highest turnover challenge as well. Certain specialized roles, such as licensed therapists and certified teachers, add an additional layer of complexity when the job market tightens or specific credentials are required.

Hiring Before Workable

Before Workable, hiring at Ascent was entirely decentralized. Each HR director at each program site managed their own individual job postings, primarily through standalone Indeed accounts, handling everything from payment and postings to interview coordination and candidate management independently. There was no shared infrastructure, no unified data, and no visibility at the corporate level.

The consequences were predictable. The process was slower because the full weight of each hire fell on a single person. Interview questions varied by site with no guarantee of consistency across programs. Collaboration between HR and clinical or operational teams was limited. And when hiring challenges arose — whether at a specific site or across the organization — there was no data available to diagnose the cause or inform a response.

“There was no visibility at the corporate level. We weren’t able to report on anything.”

When Ascent wanted to understand whether a hiring difficulty at a particular site was a process problem or a market problem, they had no way to find out. That lack of insight made it impossible to build the kind of data-driven strategy the organization needed to scale.

Why Workable

The decision to find a unified hiring solution was driven by two priorities: visibility and accountability. Leadership needed a way to present hiring performance to the board of directors, not as anecdote, but as data. And the organization needed a platform that could bring consistency to a hiring process that was, by necessity, running across multiple independent sites.

The implementation began at Three Peaks Ascent and expanded outward as the benefits became apparent. For Jodi and her team, the most important criteria were ease of implementation and organizational impact. Workable delivered on both.

Early adopters within the HR team recognized almost immediately that the platform would save them significant time. As that reality spread across sites, adoption followed — not through top-down mandate, but through demonstrated value.

“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.”

One factor that accelerated adoption was the deliberate decision to expand hiring team access beyond HR. By bringing more employees into the process — giving them visibility into candidates for their own teams and a voice in who they would be working alongside — Ascent created an ownership dynamic that made platform adoption feel less like a policy and more like a benefit.

Standardization That Protects and Improves

One of the most meaningful shifts Workable enabled was the move toward structured, consistent hiring across all six programs.

Before, there was no way to guarantee that a therapist candidate in one program was being evaluated on the same criteria as a therapist candidate at another. With Workable, Ascent built role-specific workflows and interview question sets for each position type — from residential staff to clinical roles that require multiple evaluation stages. Every candidate for the same role now moves through the same process, is asked the same questions, and is evaluated on the same criteria.

The implications go beyond efficiency. Standardization reduces the risk of inconsistency-driven compliance issues and ensures that hiring decisions are made on a defensible, equitable basis.

“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 ability to customize workflows by role — adding steps for more complex clinical hires while keeping the process streamlined for higher-volume residential roles — gave Ascent the flexibility to standardize without flattening the nuance that different positions require.

Reporting That Finally Reaches the Boardroom

Perhaps the most transformative shift for Ascent has been the ability to report. Before Workable, there was simply no data. Now, the corporate HR team tracks time to hire, qualified candidate volume, and candidate source across all six programs and uses that data to inform decisions at both the operational and strategic level.

The reporting features are, in Jodi’s words, easy to use. The team has also discovered the value of the predictive reporting functionality, which helps identify patterns in application flow. When a site is struggling to fill a role, HR can now consult historical data to determine whether the challenge reflects a temporary market dip or something that warrants a more targeted intervention.

“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.”

That shift from instinct to evidence represents a meaningful elevation of the HR function — from administrative support to strategic contributor.

Speed and Quality Without Sacrifice

For an organization where staffing levels directly correspond to client capacity, the ability to move quickly when hiring demand spikes is an operational necessity. When Ascent knows new clients are coming into a program, they need to hire to match. Workable gives them the infrastructure to do that without sacrificing process quality.

The platform saves an estimated three to five hours per hire across research, outreach, and coordination. Multi-board job distribution means roles reach candidates across platforms without manual posting on each site individually. Self-scheduling and candidate texting have streamlined communication. And the organization is actively in the process of expanding its use of automated messaging workflows to bring even more consistency and speed to candidate communication.

The hiring teams across all six programs consistently report seeing more qualified applicants — a reflection of both broader distribution and more structured evaluation that filters for fit earlier in the process.

A Candidate Experience That Works

On the candidate side, the experience is seamless. Applicants can come through Indeed, direct careers page traffic, or referral channels, and regardless of source, their information routes directly into Workable. HR is not managing multiple platforms or reconciling data across systems. Everything lives in one place.

“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 not been a source of friction. Candidates find it easy to apply, and the organization has not encountered meaningful complaints about the experience.

Looking Ahead

Three Peaks Ascent and its sister programs are continuing to grow. Ascent is in the process of deliberately expanding its use of Workable’s capabilities, particularly around automated messaging and AI screening, to make existing workflows more intentional and to maximize the return on the infrastructure already in place.

For an organization managing clinical hiring at scale, where the quality of every hire has a direct impact on the wellbeing of the teens they serve, that commitment to continuous improvement is not incidental. It is the point.

Workable gave Ascent the foundation: visibility, standardization, and speed. What the team is building on top of that foundation is a hiring function that is genuinely strategic and capable of serving both the organization’s growth and its mission.