How City Wide Facility Solutions Transformed Hiring Across 110 Locations
In today's competitive talent market, scaling a hiring operation across dozens of locations without losing speed, consistency, or candidate quality is one of the most complex challenges any organization can face. For City Wide Facility Solutions, a third-generation, family-owned building services management company founded in 1961, that challenge was very real. Operating across 110 locations nationwide and in Canada, the company needed a recruiting infrastructure that could match its ambition. The answer came in the form of Workable, integrated with the power of Indeed Talent Scout — a combination that helped the organization achieve an average time-to-fill of just 16 days.
About City Wide Facility Solutions
City Wide Facility Solutions is not your typical facilities company. Operating on a unique B2B model, the organization partners with independent contractors to manage a wide range of services — from janitorial and landscaping to maintenance and specialty facility operations. As a franchisor and franchisee operating across more than a hundred locations, the company faces a uniquely complex hiring landscape.
Hiring at City Wide spans an unusually broad spectrum of roles. In any given month, the recruiting team might be filling positions ranging from night managers and facility supervisors all the way up to sales executives and C-suite leadership. With 30 to 50 hires per year for the franchisee and franchisor alone, the need for a centralized, scalable applicant tracking system (ATS) was not a luxury — it was a necessity.
Kelsey Herbig, the talent acquisition lead responsible for managing this complexity, knew that the right platform had to do more than just post jobs. It had to support a distributed model, maintain consistent communication across every candidate interaction, and scale without adding prohibitive per-user costs.
Why Workable Was the Right ATS for a Distributed Franchise Model
Workable emerged as the solution that could meet these demands. Unlike many applicant tracking systems that charge on a per-seat basis, Workable's model allowed City Wide to support all 110 franchise locations with separate departments and individual user spaces — all within a unified hiring system. This was a critical differentiator.
For franchise organizations, the ability to maintain brand consistency while giving individual locations the autonomy they need is essential. Workable provided exactly that balance. Each franchise location could operate its own hiring pipeline, post to relevant job boards, and manage candidates locally, while the franchisor maintained visibility and oversight across the entire network.
This centralized-yet-flexible approach eliminated the chaos that comes from managing dozens of disconnected spreadsheets, email threads, and standalone tools. It replaced fragmentation with structure, and manual follow-up with automation.
Achieving 100% Applicant Response Through Automation
One of the most striking outcomes of City Wide's adoption of Workable is a 100% applicant response rate. In an era where candidate ghosting is common and employer brand reputation hinges on the hiring experience, this metric stands out.
The secret lies in Workable's automated and scheduled communication tools. Rather than relying on recruiters to manually send acknowledgment emails or status updates, the platform handles outreach at key pipeline stages automatically. Every applicant — whether they advance to an interview or are declined — receives a timely, professional response.
This matters more than many organizations realize. Candidates who feel respected during the hiring process, even when they don't get the job, are more likely to reapply in the future, refer others, and speak positively about the company. In the facilities industry, where reputation and word-of-mouth carry significant weight in local labor markets, this kind of candidate experience investment pays dividends.
The Role of Indeed Talent Scout in Expanding Candidate Reach
While Workable handles the operational backbone of City Wide's recruiting, Indeed Talent Scout plays a crucial role in expanding candidate reach and sourcing quality applicants proactively. Rather than waiting for candidates to apply, Indeed Talent Scout enables recruiters to identify and engage passive talent — people who may not be actively job searching but are open to the right opportunity.
For a company hiring across diverse roles and geographies, this proactive sourcing capability is invaluable. Night managers in regional markets, specialized facility technicians, and experienced sales executives don't always flock to job postings. Having the ability to surface and contact relevant candidates directly accelerates the pipeline significantly and contributes to City Wide's impressive 16-day average time-to-fill.
The integration between Workable and Indeed Talent Scout creates a seamless workflow. Sourced candidates from Indeed Talent Scout can be moved directly into Workable pipelines, ensuring that all candidate data, communication history, and hiring stages are tracked in one place. Recruiters gain both reach and organization without switching between platforms.
Key Results: What the Numbers Say
- Average time-to-fill of 16 days — enabling fast hiring cycles across a wide range of roles and keeping operations running without extended vacancies.
- 110 franchise locations supported with separate departments and user spaces under a single unified system, eliminating per-user fee concerns and scaling cost-effectively.
- 100% applicant response rate achieved through automated and scheduled communication, strengthening both candidate experience and employer brand.
- Centralized oversight for the franchisor alongside local autonomy for individual franchise operators, creating a hiring model that scales without losing control.
Lessons for Growing Organizations and Franchise Networks
City Wide Facility Solutions' success with Workable and Indeed Talent Scout offers several practical lessons for other growing organizations — particularly those operating across multiple locations or within a franchise structure.
First, the right ATS is not just a database for resumes. It is an active tool that shapes the candidate experience, enforces process consistency, and gives hiring teams the data they need to make faster, better decisions. Second, automation is not about removing the human touch from recruiting — it is about ensuring that every candidate receives the consistent, respectful communication that busy recruiters cannot always guarantee manually.
Third, proactive sourcing tools like Indeed Talent Scout are no longer optional for competitive hiring. In labor markets where top candidates are rarely sitting idle waiting for job postings to appear, organizations that engage passive talent have a measurable advantage.
Finally, scalability must be built into the architecture of your recruiting tech stack from the beginning. Patching together disconnected tools as an organization grows creates inefficiencies that are difficult and expensive to undo. Choosing platforms that are designed to scale — and that integrate cleanly with best-in-class sourcing tools — is a strategic investment with compounding returns.
Conclusion
City Wide Facility Solutions demonstrates that with the right combination of technology, process, and integration, even the most complex distributed hiring environments can be managed efficiently and at scale. By pairing Workable's centralized ATS capabilities with Indeed Talent Scout's proactive sourcing power, the organization built a recruiting engine that fills roles in 16 days, responds to every single applicant, and supports over a hundred locations without operational chaos. For any organization navigating similar complexity, this story is both a blueprint and an inspiration.