Leadership had launched three separate hiring and technology projects with no shared plan, no governance, and no clear articulation of what they were meant to accomplish together. Meanwhile the organization was losing roughly half of its 30,000-person frontline workforce every year, most of it within a new hire's first hundred days. The presenting issue looked like three stalled technology rollouts. The real issue was an organization that had never defined what talent acquisition should look like at its scale.
Case Study
Once hired by fax, teachers now move through one national hiring system.
One of the country's largest early childhood education providers was running three disconnected talent projects with no shared vision behind them. We combined them into a single transformation program and built the hiring, background-check, and onboarding infrastructure the organization had never had at scale.
Engagement at-a-glance
Industry:
Education
Organization size:
~ 30,000 employees
Services:
Change Management
Culture Transformation
Training & Adoption
Culture Transformation
Training & Adoption
The Challenge
The organization didn't lack initiatives. It lacked one program connecting them.
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Three related projects running with no shared plan
A new applicant tracking system, a set of custom talent assessments, and a background-check integration were being scoped as three separate, disconnected efforts, each with its own timeline and no governance tying them together, even though the underlying goals were closely related.
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Half the workforce turning over every year
The organization was losing roughly half of its 30,000-person frontline workforce annually, with most of that turnover happening in an employee's first hundred days. Because staffing ratios in early childhood education are regulated by age group and classroom, an unfilled or uncertified teaching position created a direct revenue gap, not just a staffing one.
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No enterprise view into who was actually being hired
Hiring and background-check compliance were managed inconsistently center by center, with some locations still faxing candidate packets to headquarters to process. Leadership had no reliable, company-wide visibility into who was coming through the door to work with children, or how quickly.
Our Approach
We built one future-state vision, then ran three scattered projects underneath it.
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1
Diagnosed the real problem underneath three separate projects
We stepped into three disconnected initiatives, mapped how closely related they actually were, and worked with the organization's CHRO to define what it was really trying to solve before continuing any of the individual builds.
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2
Built a future-state vision and stood up one governance structure
We combined the disparate efforts into a single transformation program with its own charter, scope, and governance, bringing in strategy, program leadership, and process design capability to run it as one initiative instead of three.
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3
Redesigned hiring, background-check, and onboarding processes end to end
Working alongside the organization's vendor partners, we redesigned the underlying business processes, configured the new applicant tracking and assessment tools, and built a first-hundred-days onboarding experience designed to run the same way at every center.
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4
Piloted with a small group before rolling out company-wide
Rather than launching to every center at once, we tested the new hiring and onboarding model with a limited group first, refined what wasn't working, and rolled it out to the full organization roughly a year and a half later.
Value Delivered
The same hiring experience, whether the center sits in Chicago or rural Georgia.
Replaced fax-based hiring with one national system
Candidate packets that once traveled by fax now move through a single applicant tracking system used consistently across every center in the network.
Built a first-hundred-days onboarding experience for every center
A consistent onboarding experience now runs at every location, regardless of size, region, or how experienced the center director happens to be.
Gave leadership its first enterprise view of hiring trends
For years after the engagement ended, leadership could see hiring activity by center across the country, something the organization had never had visibility into before, and use it to manage labor proactively rather than reactively.
Selected new hires using the traits of the organization's best teachers
Using data on what set its top-performing teachers apart, the organization built custom assessments to select for those same traits during hiring, rather than relying on instinct alone.
Results that reflect the work behind them.
3,000+
Early learning centers supported through the hiring and onboarding transformation
14,000
Annual hires streamlined into a consistent two- to three-week hiring cycle
~ 50%
Approximate annual teacher turnover the transformation was built to address
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Work With Us
The firms that move fastest don’t wait for clarity. They create it.
We help leadership teams cut their ambiguity, align around what matters, and build the momentum to transform their business.