How City Wide Facility Solutions Scales Hiring Across 110 Locations with Workable and Indeed Talent Scout
Recruiting at scale is one of the most complex operational challenges a growing organization can face. When your hiring needs span over a hundred locations, dozens of role types, and a distributed franchise model, the margin for inefficiency is essentially zero. City Wide Facility Solutions knows this firsthand — and their story offers a compelling blueprint for how modern HR technology can transform even the most complicated talent acquisition operation into a well-oiled machine.
Who Is City Wide Facility Solutions?
Founded in 1961, City Wide Facility Solutions is a third-generation, family-owned building services management company with deep roots in the American enterprise landscape. Operating across 110 locations nationwide and in Canada, City Wide manages a broad portfolio of facility services — from janitorial operations and landscaping to maintenance and specialty facility management. What makes the company especially unique is its B2B model, which relies on partnerships with independent contractors rather than a traditional employee workforce.
This structure creates a layered, distributed hiring environment that few off-the-shelf recruiting tools are built to handle. The company hires for both the franchisee and franchisor levels, covering roles as diverse as night managers, sales executives, and C-suite leadership positions. With 30 to 50 hires per year at minimum just at the corporate and franchise operations level, the need for a centralized, scalable applicant tracking system became impossible to ignore.
The Hiring Challenge: Complexity at Scale
Kelsey Herbig, the HR professional overseeing talent acquisition at City Wide, faced a challenge that will resonate with recruiters at any multi-site organization. Coordinating hiring pipelines across 110 separate franchise locations, each with its own operational context and staffing needs, demands more than a shared spreadsheet or generic job posting tool. It requires a system that can maintain centralized oversight while allowing individual locations the flexibility to manage their own candidate pipelines.
Beyond logistics, City Wide needed a solution that would not penalize growth. Many enterprise HR platforms charge per user or per location, quickly making scalability prohibitively expensive. For a franchise network aiming to expand, every tool choice carries long-term financial consequences. The right ATS had to offer broad access without runaway costs.
Why Workable Became the Solution
Workable emerged as the answer to City Wide's hiring complexity. As a modern applicant tracking system built with both scalability and usability in mind, Workable gave City Wide the infrastructure to manage a high volume of diverse roles across a sprawling geographic footprint. The platform's ability to support separate departments and user spaces within a single account was a critical feature — enabling each of the 110 franchise locations to operate with its own structured hiring environment while remaining connected to a unified system.
Perhaps most significantly, Workable's pricing model does not impose per-user fees, meaning City Wide could extend platform access across its entire franchise network without triggering cost escalation. This single decision created a scalable foundation for hiring that aligns directly with the company's growth ambitions.
Indeed Talent Scout: Proactive Sourcing at the Push of a Button
While Workable addressed the organizational infrastructure side of hiring, City Wide also needed a way to proactively reach qualified candidates rather than waiting passively for applications to arrive. This is where Indeed Talent Scout became a game-changer.
Indeed Talent Scout is a sourcing tool integrated within the Workable platform that allows recruiters to identify and engage passive candidates directly from Indeed's enormous talent database. Rather than relying solely on inbound applicants, City Wide's recruiting team could actively surface candidates who matched their specific role criteria and reach out to them before competitors had a chance. For roles that are notoriously difficult to fill — such as experienced facility managers or specialized sales executives — this proactive capability dramatically shortened the path from open requisition to qualified pipeline.
The Results: Fast, Efficient, and Candidate-Friendly Hiring
The impact of combining Workable's ATS capabilities with Indeed Talent Scout's sourcing power was measurable and swift. City Wide achieved an average time-to-fill of just 16 days — a figure that reflects not only recruiting speed but also the operational precision that a well-configured system enables. Fast hiring cycles mean fewer days of operational gaps, lower pressure on existing staff, and a better experience for hiring managers who no longer face prolonged vacancy periods.
Equally impressive is City Wide's achievement of a 100% applicant response rate. Using Workable's automated and scheduled communication features, every single candidate who applied received a timely, professional response. In a competitive talent market where candidate experience is increasingly a differentiator, this commitment to communication strengthens City Wide's employer brand and ensures that no qualified applicant falls through the cracks due to administrative delays.
- Average time-to-fill: 16 days — enabling fast hiring cycles across a wide variety of roles.
- 100% applicant response rate — achieved through automated and scheduled candidate communications.
- 110 franchise locations supported — with separate department and user spaces inside a single unified system.
- No per-user fees — allowing unrestricted platform access that scales with growth rather than against it.
Key Lessons for Multi-Location and Franchise Recruiters
City Wide's experience with Workable and Indeed Talent Scout offers several actionable lessons for HR and talent acquisition leaders managing distributed hiring environments.
First, infrastructure matters before strategy. The most sophisticated recruiting tactics will fail if the underlying system cannot handle organizational complexity. Choosing an ATS with genuine multi-location support — not just a workaround — is foundational.
Second, proactive sourcing is no longer optional. With talent shortages affecting nearly every industry, waiting for applications is a passive strategy that leaves roles open longer than necessary. Tools like Indeed Talent Scout allow recruiting teams to play offense, identifying and engaging qualified candidates before they even begin an active job search.
Third, candidate communication is a brand investment. Ensuring that every applicant receives a response is not just courteous — it is a strategic signal about how your organization treats people. In an era where employer reviews spread rapidly online, responsiveness builds reputation.
Conclusion: A Scalable Model for Modern Recruiting
City Wide Facility Solutions has demonstrated that complex, distributed hiring does not have to mean chaotic or inefficient recruiting. By centralizing operations in Workable and augmenting outbound sourcing with Indeed Talent Scout, the company transformed a logistically challenging hiring model into a competitive advantage. For franchise organizations, multi-site employers, and any company navigating growth across a distributed workforce, the City Wide story is a clear and practical roadmap worth following.