“We know we’re saving lives, and we know we’re doing that through the people you help us get”
THE CHALLENGE
Eight clinics, sixty-five therapists, and a race to 110
David Brunick spent forty years in HR before he became a therapist — Chief HR Officer at AT&T among the roles along the way — so when he opened eight Ellie Mental Health clinics across Colorado and Wyoming in eighteen months, he already knew exactly what hiring at scale was supposed to look like. He calls the pace he actually kept “a fine line between driven and crazy.”
Sixty-five therapists later, the growth hasn’t slowed. He and Becky, who runs day-to-day recruiting across four of the eight clinics with her counterpart Michael, are working toward 110 employees within six months. Therapy is a business built on human connection, and connection is exactly what makes hiring for it hard. “80% of success in therapy is the therapeutic alliance,” David said — the relationship between therapist and client, not the credentials on a resume. Skills can be trained. Connection has to be hired for, and evaluating it takes real judgment, not a keyword scan.
The financial pressure compounds the problem. Clinics need enough therapists on staff to meet client demand the moment someone calls — but not so many that caseloads sit empty. “It’s recruiting clinicians and clients at the same cadence,” David said, “so you don’t go broke.”
None of that gets easier when eight clinics solve it separately. Candidates in Boulder County, where two of the clinics sit, routinely apply to more than one Ellie location at once. Without a shared system, that meant clinic managers duplicating outreach to the same candidate, or losing a strong one in the gap between two locations that didn’t know they were both interested. “It would be far more like working in silos,” Becky said — and for a network built on the eight clinics acting as one “herd,” as they call it internally, silos were the one thing the system couldn’t afford.
THE SOLUTION
One account, visible to every clinic manager
All eight Ellie clinics run through a single, shared CareerPlug account. Every clinic manager can see applicant activity across every location — not just their own — including where else a candidate has applied and what the initial impression was.
That shared view turned a structural risk into a structural advantage. When one candidate with a standout skill set applied to two clinics at once, the clinic manager in Greeley spotted it immediately: “Dibs, please,” she said, before the candidate could get lost between two locations that didn’t realize they were both interested.
A system built by people who know franchise hiring is different
The reason David trusts it: “You all work with franchisors and franchisees. You know our business. It is different,” he said. “It would be difficult to find a platform that thinks this way.” That’s the value of working with a team of franchise hiring experts rather than a generic ATS — the shared visibility across clinics exists because CareerPlug built for multi-location networks specifically, not single-site businesses with a location number stapled on.
What clinic managers get:
- Shared visibility into every applicant across all eight clinics, so a strong candidate never falls into the gap between two locations
- Account access that extends beyond internal staff, so outside contractors can screen candidates inside the same system — no separate handoff
- Job descriptions clinic managers can adjust in real time based on candidate feedback, sharpening what gets highlighted from one posting to the next
What David gets as owner and executive advisor:
- A single system covering all eight clinics, instead of eight separate hiring processes to track individually
- Real visibility into hiring pace and candidate volume network-wide, from wherever he's working that day
- One platform to potentially build from as Ellie's needs grow beyond hiring and into broader employee tracking
HIRING DATA
Inside Ellie’s own account, Autopilot’s advantage is clear: in March 2026, Autopilot-handled applicants converted from first contact to a scheduled interview at 83.9%, compared to 46.7% for applicants handled the standard way.
Source: CareerPlug internal data
THE RESULTS
From over nine days to just two — and a careers page that had been quietly outperforming Indeed all along
When asked what single thing would make everything else easier, David didn’t hesitate: “Speed.” He described wanting to go straight from a candidate email to their profile — “click it, and it took me to the candidate” — without losing momentum on a strong applicant. The data shows that’s exactly what happened.
Average time to first contact during a recent three-month stretch, down from 9.11 days over the life of the account, a 76% improvement. Time to interview scheduled moved the same direction, from 6.42 days down to 3.25.
Of all applicants came through Ellie’s own careers page, a fraction of the 33.9% that came through Indeed, the network’s largest single source. The careers page also drove 13.2% of all hires, while Indeed, despite sending three times the applicants, drove just 23.7% — making Ellie’s own careers page nearly twice as likely, applicant for applicant, to produce a hire.
Applicants left unreviewed today, down from 13.3% over the life of the account — a 39% drop, and far fewer candidates lost in the shuffle across eight clinics.
Therapists hired per month across the network over the past year — right in line with the three-to-five-a-month pace Becky and David estimated on their own, before they ever pulled the actual number. At that pace, the network is on track to keep closing the gap toward its goal of 110 employees within six months.
We are at 5% employee turnover — the lowest of all franchisees across the country.
THE TAKEAWAY
A franchise network only sees what it measures — and it can’t measure the same thing eight different ways
Franchising works because a good process built in one location can become the standard everywhere. Hiring is often the exception: left to each location to figure out alone, even though it decides whether the rest of the system ever gets staffed to run.
Ellie Mental Health closed that gap twice over — once by giving every clinic manager the same view of every applicant, and again by giving David and Becky a clear picture of something they’d never had the bandwidth to track by hand: which channels were actually working. Neither result came from working harder. Both came from a system that could finally show them what eight separate hiring processes never could.
For David, the stakes go beyond staffing numbers. Ellie’s clients take standard clinical assessments at the start of therapy, and many begin at a level indicating real risk. After eight sessions, the vast majority move to mild symptoms or remission. “We know we’re saving lives,” David said, “and we know we’re doing that through the people you help us get.”
That’s the case for treating hiring as a system, not a location-by-location scramble: the faster and more precisely a franchise connects the right candidates to the right clinics, the faster those clinics can do the work they exist to do.
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