How Avid4 Adventure Cuts Seasonal Hiring Time in Half with Ashby

Avid4 Adventure inspires kids to live active, outdoor lifestyles through summer camps that serve over 10,000 campers across five states. Their lean, full-time team of 17 employees relies on hundreds of experienced camp counselors working over the summer to deliver these programs. 

In 2023, Avid4 Adventure partnered with Ashby to tackle seasonal hiring challenges, including a long time-to-hire and manual, inefficient workflows. By implementing Ashby’s All-in-One solution, the company transformed its recruitment process, achieving faster hiring, better forecasting, and improved operational efficiency.

Problem: Slow and unpredictable talent pipelines

Seasonal hiring at Avid4 Adventure is a high-pressure process. With only a few months to recruit 500 qualified and motivated staff members, the team faced several hurdles:

• Lengthy Time-to-Hire: It took 24 days on average to hire a seasonal employee, often delaying onboarding and program readiness.
• Limited Visibility: Without real-time data, the team struggled to track progress or predict hiring outcomes, risking missed targets and canceled summer programs.
• Manual Data Transfers: Moving data from their hiring system to WorkBright, their onboarding platform, required tedious manual entry, resulting in errors and inefficiencies in staff onboarding.

These inefficiencies not only strained resources but also jeopardized program execution in years when hiring goals were unmet.

Solution: Powerfully flexible ATS for high-volume hiring

Tori Madsen, Talent Acquisition Manager at Avid4 Adventure, had experience with several applicant tracking systems but found Ashby uniquely suited to their needs.

“Only Ashby offered the customizability, data insights, and efficiency we were looking for to manage high-volume, fast-paced seasonal hiring.” —Tori Madsen, Talent Acquisition Manager at Avid4 Adventure

Madsen turned to Ashby after becoming frustrated by overly-prescriptive legacy ATS solutions. Avid4 Adventure’s hiring needs were too unique and time-sensitive to follow out-of-the-box ATS playbooks. Instead, Avid4 Adventure built custom interview pipelines, reporting, and automations to hire and onboard diverse, uniquely qualified candidates to bring outdoor education to life.

Custom workflows to better ID top talent 

• Advanced sorting and filtering: Like many hiring teams, Avid4 accepts a high volume of applicants for seasonal roles. Ashby’s custom application fields made it easy for the talent team to prioritize candidates with the right skills and experience quickly.
• Custom interview pipelines: Avid4 hires a mix of local and international staff to fill identical roles. With Ashby, they can manage separate pipelines for international and domestic applicants, with different touchpoints and data collection requirements all tied to a single role.
• Comprehensive search: Candidates regularly shared valuable experiences that Avid4’s applications missed. Ashby’s powerful search function enabled Avid4’s talent team to identify and prioritize unique candidates quickly.

“By the nature of our industry, many applicants’ relevant experience doesn’t show up in applications. Ashby made it easy to note details like ‘Olympic rock climbing tryouts’ in a searchable way for our hiring teams.” —Tori Madsen, Talent Acquisition Manager at Avid4 Adventure

Real-time data for hiring team agility

On top of a dynamic recruiting process, Avid4 took advantage of Ashby features that boosted their organizational agility.

“Ashby’s real-time data gave us a level of visibility we’ve never had before. We were a month ahead of our hiring ramp, which is a milestone we hadn’t hit in eight years.”—Tori Madsen, Talent Acquisition Manager at Avid4 Adventure

• Real-time forecasting: Ashby’s pipeline reporting helped Avid4’s hiring team identify staffing gaps much sooner than before. This allowed them to dial up sourcing where needed to for tough to fill roles. 
• Integrated candidate texting: Avid4’s college-aged candidates aren’t checking their inboxes often. Ashby’s Keeyora integration allowed the team to extend offers via SMS, the candidate’s preferred method. With this integration, the team expedited offer acceptance timelines to less than 24 hours.
• Bulk data transfers: Once hired, Avid4’s talent team used Ashby’s bulk data importing to transfer candidate data from Ashby into their HRIS (WorkBright). A formerly manual and error-prone process became faster, more accurate, and a lot more pleasant. In the first hiring season alone, bulk data transfers saved the team 25 hours of manual work when onboarding their 500 hires.

Impact: 50% faster hiring

Overall, Avid4’s very lean hiring team managed to transform how the company attracts, identifies and supports the hundreds of staff who bring their mission to life for campers.

“With Ashby, we cut our time-to-hire in half. For a seasonal hiring operation like ours, that’s critical. The speed and efficiency Ashby brings to our process have made a huge difference.”—Tori Madsen, Talent Acquisition Manager at Avid4 Adventure

• 50% Faster Hiring: The average time-to-hire for seasonal employees dropped from 24 days to 12 days.
• 4 Weeks Ahead of Goals: Avid4 Adventure met staffing targets a month ahead of schedule for the first time in nearly a decade.
• Dozens of Hours Saved: Automating data transfers saved the team dozens of hours during their busiest hiring period.
• Significant Cost Savings: Ashby’s Al-in-One recruiting solution saved  tens of thousands of dollars in headcount and sourcing costs compared to previous years.

By partnering with Ashby, Avid4 Adventure revolutionized its hiring process, achieving speed, accuracy, and scalability. For a small team managing high-volume seasonal recruitment, the platform has been transformative.

Learn more about how Ashby can support your hiring goals at ashbyhq.com.