From Fragmented Recruiting to Predictable Hiring Delivery

Client Overview

A large, multi-division ABA services organization engaged StratTech to modernize its Talent Acquisition operating model. The organization had strong local recruiting capability and deep relationships across its business units. But as the company scaled, recruiting became harder to manage consistently.

Workflows varied by division. Hiring manager visibility was limited. Candidate communication was fragmented. TA leaders did not have a clean way to measure recruiting performance across regions.

In ABA services, recruiting is not a support function. It is a capacity engine.

BCBA availability affects how much care the organization can deliver. It affects how much RBT capacity can be supervised. It affects how quickly growth can become real operating capacity. When BCBA hiring slows or recruiting workflows lack discipline, the impact shows up across the business. Supervision gets stretched. Schedules become harder to manage. Utilization can fall. Growth becomes constrained.

The client needed more than a technology implementation. It needed a clear, scalable, and predictable recruiting operating model built for a capacity-constrained ABA labor market. That model was supported by Ashby as the ATS, Joveo for programmatic recruitment advertising, and BrightHire for interview intelligence.

The Challenge

The organization’s TA model had evolved through local adaptation. That gave individual teams flexibility, but it also created inconsistency across the enterprise.

• Inconsistent workflows across business units
• Fragmented requisition approval and job posting practices
• Limited hiring manager visibility into requisition status and pipeline health
• Recruiting data controlled largely by TA instead of visible to business stakeholders
• Manual workarounds across approvals, screening, scheduling, and handoffs
• Disconnected candidate and hiring team communications
• Limited ability to measure bottlenecks, recruiter productivity, and SLA adherence in real time
• Difficulty creating predictable hiring timelines across regions and role types

The risk was clear. Without operating model discipline, any technology investment would only automate inconsistent processes. For ABA operators, that risk is even greater. Recruiting delays are not isolated HR delays. An open BCBA role can mean constrained care delivery, delayed starts, under-leveraged RBT capacity, and missed growth opportunity.

Time-to-fill is not just a recruiting metric. In ABA services, it is a capacity metric.

StratTech’s Approach

StratTech led the engagement as a design-led operating model transformation, not a traditional ATS rollout.

The work began by bringing Recruiting, HR, hiring managers, operational leaders, and executive sponsors into structured Mural-based intelligent design sessions. These sessions created alignment around how hiring should work in the future state.

• Surface differences across divisions
• Clarify decision rights between Recruiting, HR, hiring managers, and leadership
• Define practical future-state workflows
• Translate business needs into system requirements
• Build shared ownership of the future-state model
• Reduce resistance by involving stakeholders in the design
• Create momentum for change before full implementation

This was a critical part of the work. Stakeholders were not simply trained on a new system. They helped shape the operating model behind it. That mattered because the organization was not only changing recruiting technology. It was changing how the business managed hiring capacity.

The Solution

StratTech designed and implemented a standardized TA operating model supported by a best-of-breed recruiting technology stack: Ashby for ATS workflows and reporting, Joveo for programmatic recruitment advertising, and BrightHire for interview intelligence.

The engagement focused on seven core workstreams.

1. Cross-Functional Operating Model Design

StratTech facilitated structured Mural-based intelligent design sessions with Recruiting, HR, hiring managers, operational leadership, and executive sponsors. The sessions answered practical questions: what should be standardized, where local flexibility mattered, who owned each step, what hiring managers needed to see directly, what should be measured, and where the system should enforce process discipline.

2. Standardized Hiring Workflows

StratTech defined a smaller set of core hiring workflows aligned to the organization’s major hiring scenarios: high-volume hourly hiring, sourcing-led clinical and specialized hiring, and corporate and leadership hiring. This reduced unnecessary variation while preserving flexibility where the business needed it.

3. Modern Recruiting Infrastructure

The organization moved from a legacy ATS environment with multiple workflow versions into Ashby, which became the single source of truth for requisitions, job postings, candidate workflows, hiring manager visibility, reporting, dashboards, process enforcement, audit trails, and candidate movement.

4. Programmatic Recruitment Advertising

The organization implemented Joveo to improve programmatic recruitment advertising and create a more disciplined approach to paid candidate acquisition. Joveo helped align advertising spend to hiring demand, role type, market conditions, and applicant flow.

5. Hiring Manager Transparency

Hiring managers gained direct visibility into requisition-level activity, candidate movement, and process status. That reduced dependency on recruiters for manual updates and changed TA’s role from data gatekeeper to strategic operator.

6. Centralized Communication and Interview Visibility

Recruiting activity became more visible through structured system records, centralized communications, and BrightHire interview intelligence. BrightHire gave the organization better visibility into interviews, hiring team feedback, and candidate conversations.

7. Measurement, Dashboards, and Coaching

StratTech implemented operational dashboards and recruiter scorecards to track SLA adherence, time-in-status, requisition approval lead time, time-to-fill, recruiter productivity, candidate movement, bottlenecks, at-risk requisitions, and hiring volume by role type, region, and workflow.

The Results

106% Increase in hires | 19% Decrease in time-to-fill | 11.1% Decrease in recruiting staff

Following the transformation, the organization achieved measurable operating gains. Comparing the first half of 2025 before the project to the first half of 2026 after the project, hires increased 106%, time-to-fill decreased 19%, and recruiting staff decreased 11.1%. The organization improved hiring throughput while operating with a leaner recruiting function.

The transformation improved operating leverage. The organization more than doubled hiring output, filled roles faster, and did so with fewer recruiting resources. That combination matters in ABA services because recruiting efficiency is directly connected to operational capacity. Faster, more disciplined hiring helps the business add provider capacity, support growth, and reduce friction across care delivery operations.

Qualitative Impact

• Increased trust between TA and hiring managers
• Better visibility into requisition-level recruiting activity
• Reduced dependency on recruiters as manual data intermediaries
• More transparent candidate and hiring team communication
• More consistent workflows across regions and business units
• Stronger accountability through dashboards, SLAs, and audit trails
• Clearer ownership across Recruiting, HR, hiring managers, and leadership
• Greater leadership confidence in recruiting performance data
• Improved ability to coach recruiters and intervene on process bottlenecks

The most important qualitative shift was that recruiting became visible and measurable. Hiring managers could access the information they needed directly. TA could focus less on explaining what was happening and more on improving outcomes.

Business Impact

The organization moved from fragmented recruiting execution to a more disciplined and scalable TA operating model. The value was not limited to a new system or better dashboards. The broader impact came from combining cross-functional future-state design, operating model standardization, stakeholder alignment, technology enablement, data transparency, governance routines, performance management, and recruiter coaching.

By involving Recruiting, HR, hiring managers, and leadership in structured Mural-based design sessions, StratTech helped create the momentum needed for sustainable change. For ABA services organizations, this kind of discipline is increasingly non-negotiable. BCBA supply is constrained, and hiring inefficiency consumes capacity the business cannot afford to waste.

Why It Worked

The engagement succeeded because it did not treat technology as the transformation. The technology mattered, but it was only effective because the operating model had been clarified first.

StratTech helped the organization define how work should flow, who should own each step, what data should be visible, where process discipline was required, and how performance would be measured.

The transformation worked because technology was not treated as the transformation. The operating model came first. The system enabled it.

The result was a TA function that could support higher hiring volume, improve speed, reduce manual dependency, and build greater trust with the business.