How LandCare Transformed Talent Acquisition at Scale
Hiring across a national organization with 76 locations, 23 states, and a workforce that swells to 4,000 employees at peak season is no small feat. For LandCare, one of the country's leading commercial landscape management companies, talent acquisition had to be both centralized enough to maintain consistency and flexible enough to support dozens of individual branches managing their own recruiting. The result of getting this balance right? A 23% reduction in time to hire — and a recruiting operation built to scale.
This is the story of how LandCare did it, what challenges they overcame, and what other growing organizations can learn from their approach.
Who Is LandCare?
LandCare is a national commercial landscape management company operating across 23 U.S. states. At its seasonal peak, the organization employs approximately 4,000 people, making it one of the larger field-based workforces in the landscaping industry. Behind that workforce is a dedicated talent acquisition function led by Alex Kline, Director of Talent Acquisition and Employee Services.
Alex manages a team of six recruiters who handle exempt-level, corporate, and executive hiring across the organization. At the same time, his team serves as subject matter experts and strategic advisors to the company's many branch locations, which manage their own crew-level recruiting with TA team guidance. The roles LandCare regularly hires for include branch administrators, production managers, account managers, branch managers, and a wide range of corporate functions — finance, IT, HR, marketing, and operations — along with periodic executive searches at the VP and director level.
It is a complex, multi-tiered hiring environment that demands the right tools, processes, and infrastructure to function efficiently. That is precisely where Workable came in.
The Challenge: Recruiting at Scale Without Losing Control
Growing organizations that operate through distributed locations face a common tension in talent acquisition: how do you give individual teams the autonomy to hire the people they need, while ensuring consistent processes, quality standards, and compliance across the board?
For LandCare, this challenge was amplified by sheer volume and geographic spread. With 76 branches operating across the country, the central TA team could not be everywhere at once. Branch managers needed to post jobs, review applicants, and move quickly — especially for crew-level roles where seasonal urgency is high. But without the right platform and structure, those efforts risked becoming siloed, inconsistent, or inefficient.
The organization needed a recruiting solution that could serve multiple user types simultaneously: a professional TA team handling sophisticated corporate and executive searches, and branch-level managers who needed simplicity and speed for high-volume field hiring.
The Solution: Workable as the Operating System for Recruiting
LandCare implemented Workable as its applicant tracking system across the entire organization — from the central TA team to every branch location. This unified approach meant that regardless of where a hire originated, it lived within the same platform, followed the same pipeline structure, and generated the same data.
For the central TA team, Workable provided the depth and functionality needed to manage complex, multi-stage hiring processes for corporate and executive roles. For branch managers handling crew-level recruiting, the platform offered a straightforward interface that made posting jobs, reviewing candidates, and advancing applicants through stages accessible even for non-recruiters.
By using a single platform across all 76 locations, LandCare gained something invaluable: visibility. Leadership and the TA team could see what was happening across the organization in real time — where pipelines were healthy, where positions were stalling, and where branches needed additional support or coaching.
Key Outcomes: What LandCare Achieved
The impact of LandCare's recruiting transformation was measurable and meaningful. Among the most significant outcomes:
- 23% reduction in time to hire: By streamlining workflows and centralizing recruiting activity within Workable, LandCare significantly cut the time it took to move candidates from application to offer. Faster hiring means fewer positions sitting vacant and less operational strain on branches waiting for critical staff.
- Consistent recruiting processes across 76 locations: With every branch operating within the same system, LandCare could standardize job postings, interview stages, and candidate communication. This consistency improved the candidate experience and made it easier to train branch managers on best practices.
- Scalable advisory model: Rather than trying to centralize all hiring decisions, LandCare empowered branches to manage their own crew-level recruiting while the TA team focused on higher-complexity roles. Workable made this distributed model sustainable by giving everyone a shared language and infrastructure.
- Improved data and reporting: Access to organization-wide recruiting data allowed the TA team to identify trends, track performance metrics, and make informed decisions about where to invest recruiting resources.
Lessons for Other Multi-Location Organizations
LandCare's experience offers practical lessons for any organization managing hiring across multiple sites or regions. A few principles stand out.
Standardization enables autonomy
When everyone operates within the same system and follows the same foundational process, it becomes much easier to give local teams meaningful autonomy. Branches at LandCare could move quickly on hiring without the TA team needing to intervene at every step — because the guardrails were already built into the platform.
Centralized visibility is a strategic advantage
For TA leaders managing distributed teams, the ability to see pipeline health across all locations is not a luxury — it is a necessity. Without that visibility, small problems become big problems before anyone notices. Workable gave LandCare's TA team the oversight to be proactive rather than reactive.
The right tool reduces friction for non-recruiters
Branch managers are not HR professionals. Asking them to navigate a complex or unintuitive system adds friction that slows hiring down. LandCare's success depended in part on choosing a platform that made the hiring process accessible to people for whom recruiting is just one of many responsibilities.
Why Time to Hire Matters More Than You Think
A 23% reduction in time to hire is not just a recruiting metric — it is a business outcome. In field-based industries like landscape management, unfilled positions have direct operational consequences. Teams are understaffed, service quality can slip, and existing employees bear the burden of covering vacant roles. Faster hiring means faster staffing, which translates directly to better service delivery and reduced pressure on existing teams.
For LandCare, cutting time to hire by nearly a quarter represented a meaningful competitive advantage — the ability to bring the right people on board faster than before, at scale, without sacrificing quality or consistency.
Final Thoughts
LandCare's recruiting transformation is a compelling example of what becomes possible when talent acquisition strategy is backed by the right technology. By deploying Workable across all 76 locations, aligning central and branch-level recruiting within a single platform, and empowering their TA team to operate as strategic advisors rather than transactional processors, LandCare built a hiring operation capable of supporting a 4,000-person workforce across 23 states.
The 23% reduction in time to hire is the headline result — but the deeper story is about building a recruiting infrastructure that scales with the business, keeps quality consistent, and makes every person involved in hiring more effective at their job. For growing organizations navigating similar complexity, LandCare's approach offers a clear and replicable blueprint.