Applied Behavior Center for Autism

For Applied Behavior Center, Smart Screening’s value is simple: less time chasing calendars, more time hiring the right people to care for children and families across Indiana.

About Applied Behavior Center for Autism

Applied Behavior Center for Autism is Indiana’s longest‑standing and largest Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) therapy provider, serving children and young adults with autism ages 2 to 21. Founded in 1997 by CEO Sherry Michael after her son’s autism diagnosis, Applied Behavior Center has grown from therapy sessions in her home to 22 centers across the state.

Applied Behavior Center’s mission goes beyond therapy. The team is deeply focused on providing families with respite and confidence that their children are not only safe but also actively progressing. That puts tremendous responsibility on HR to hire people who can deliver consistent, high‑quality care.

“There’s a lot of pressure on us to hire the best people. We want them (our children) to be treated with dignity and respect.” – Tracey Sampson, Human Resources Director

Today, Applied Behavior Center employs about 305 staff, most of whom are Behavior Technicians (BTs) and Registered Behavior Technicians (RBTs), often managing high‑behavior cases.

Hiring goals and challenges

High volume, high stakes

Applied Behavior Center’s core hiring objective is straightforward: hire 6 people each week into frontline clinical roles, primarily Registered Behavior Technicians (RBTs) and Behavior Technicians (BTs).

While they consistently work toward this goal, high turnover makes the task challenging. Their average tenure is about 14 months, yet they still need to maintain a constant focus on backfilling open roles.

At the same time, RBTs are incredibly hard to find and in high demand. Candidates often make decisions based largely on compensation, and ghosting is common at both the interview and offer stages, adding even more pressure to meet weekly hiring targets.

Painful, manual scheduling

Before Smart Screening, Applied Behavior Center’s biggest bottleneck was scheduling interviews. Recruiters had to coordinate with each candidate to find a time that worked, often cycling through multiple options before they could get scheduled.

Their process looked like:

• Scheduling each interview could take 30+ minutes of back‑and‑forth coordination.
• By the time some candidates replied, their time slots were already filled.
• With roughly 20 interviews per week, Tracey estimates at least 4 hours every week were spent on scheduling alone — and that would have doubled with today’s interview volume.

“We would be texting, emailing back and forth… 15, 20, 30 minutes trying to get someone scheduled.” – Tracey Sampson

By giving candidates direct access to a live calendar to schedule their own interviews, Smart Screening effectively cuts out the “middle-man” logistics, reduces the risk of losing candidates during scheduling and frees the team to focus on actual interviews instead of calendar coordination.

The Smart Screening Solution

Applied Behavior Center adopted Smart Screening to support its hiring, with a particular focus on leveraging the automated scheduling and Smart Fit Score™ automation capabilities.

Smart Screening evaluates resumes against your objective criteria, surfaces candidate summaries, and exposes top‑of‑resume information inside the workflow.

With Smart Screening, Applied Behavior Center’s process now looks like this:

1. Candidates apply through Indeed, applications are screened by Smart Screening, and then flow into their ATS.
2. Smart Screening calculates a Smart Fit Score for each application to give recruiters a quick signal (0–100) of how well the candidate matches that specific job’s requirements.
3. Candidates whose application scores meet the Applied Behavior Center-defined threshold of ≥ 60 are automatically invited to self‑schedule their interviews within available time slots. Recruiters retain discretion over how to engage with all other applicants.
4. During review, Tracey and his team still quickly scan the resume to validate experience, job history and quality, with the Smart Fit Score and candidate summary serving as a useful confirmation.

"I look it [the candidate summary] over for like 30 seconds, and then I go right to the resume… the scores are quite accurate, and they're good."

Tracey Sampson, Human Resources Director
Applied Behavior Center for Autism

Smart Screening hasn’t replaced human judgment — it’s focused their time on the right candidates and removed manual admin from getting those candidates onto the calendar.

Results

2x+ increase in interviews per week

Before adopting scheduling automation through Smart Screening, Applied Behavior Center typically conducted 15–20 interviews per week.

In the first weeks with Smart Screening and automated scheduling based on score threshold, they roughly doubled interview volume while keeping HR headcount the same.

“On average, it has spiked by having the system schedule interviews for us. We’ve been doing it for 3 weeks, and one week we had 47 [interviews], one week we had 41 [interviews], and then one week we had 34 [interviews], and we have 44 interviews already this week!” – Tracey Sampson

Reaching and exceeding weekly hiring goals

Applied Behavior Center’s goal is to onboard 6 new hires per week. Prior to implementing Smart Screening, they averaged 3 to 4.5 hires per week. Within a few weeks of adopting Smart Screening, they are averaging 6.8 starts per week — the highest rate Applied Behavior Center has seen in Tracey’s tenure and in recent company history.

“We’re shooting for about 6 hires a week. We’re at 6.8 right now for this year, and this is the highest that we’ve been well, since I’ve been here… It’s the most that we’ve ever had!” – Tracey Sampson

Significant time savings and efficiency gains

By moving from manual scheduling to candidate self‑scheduling, Applied Behavior Center has won back time in their schedule:

• Previously, Tracey’s team spent ~4 hours per week on scheduling alone, conducting ~20+ interviews/week.
• With today’s higher volume, Tracey estimates Smart Screening saves around 8 hours per week in scheduling work — effectively a full workday every week of HR time.

“We were scheduling, let’s say, 20‑some a week… 20 minutes at a time… we’re talking 4 hours… and now it’s down to zero, because we’re not doing it… We’re saving probably a solid 8 hours.” – Tracey Sampson

Those hours are now reallocated toward:

• Conducting more interviews
• Coaching newer HR staff on efficient evaluation
• Managing other strategic HR and operational tasks

 

Stronger RBT pipelines and applicant pools

Over the past year, Applied Behavior Center has evolved from small Sponsored Jobs campaigns to a coordinated, full-funnel Indeed strategy.

By layering Employer Branding Hub (EBH), Smart Sourcing, Premium Sponsored Jobs and now Smart Screening, they’ve strengthened brand awareness, stayed within budget while targeting specific backgrounds, and given recruiters more high-quality options — including both active and passive candidates.

With this full suite working together:

• Applied Behavior Center is hiring “a lot more RBTs” and seeing a “plethora of more applicants,” even in historically difficult roles like BCBAs.
• The team believes overall candidate quality is up, particularly because they are now consistently making more RBT hires in a very competitive market and securing more interviews per week.

“We’re hiring a lot more RBTs, and we’re getting a lot more applicants… I would say the quality’s up. An RBT is an RBT. They’re very difficult to find.” – Tracey Sampson

What they value most about Smart Screening

When asked why Applied Behavior Center has stayed with Smart Screening, Tracey’s answer is direct:

“The reason we’re sticking with this whole process is because of the automated scheduling. That has been a game-changer. It’s saving us a lot of time.” – Tracey Sampson

Key reasons:

• Automated scheduling has turned a painful, manual process into a “seamless” candidate experience.
• Smart Fit Score thresholds help ensure highly relevant applicants can book time automatically, reducing noise and time on interviews.
• The combination of more applicants, more registered RBTs, and more efficient workflows has allowed Applied Behavior Center to hit and exceed its aggressive weekly hiring goals.

“It’s seamless, we don’t even have to talk to them about it… They’re scheduling themselves. And then we’re going right into the interview.” – Tracey Sampson