The Self-Service Shift: How Acadia and The Aspen Group Cut Support Tickets with HRIT Hub

Every HRIT team has a version of the same story: a change that should take minutes gets held up by a support ticket for days. Maybe it’s a new job category that needs to be mapped before a req goes live. Maybe it’s a UTM source code that needs to be added before a campaign launches. These are simple, repeatable tasks, but each one comes with a dependency, a queue, and a wait time.

At IAMPHENOM 2026, Acadia Healthcare’s Katie Fayes, Project Manager, Talent Acquisition, and The Aspen Group’s Reece White, Senior Manager, Recruitment Marketing Technology, shared what changed when they adopted the self-service capabilities made possible by Phenom’s HRIT Hub. Find out how their own ability to make routine platform changes altered the pace of their entire operation so they could move at the speed of applied AI.

Watch the full session here, or explore the highlights below!

What Does a Traditional Support Ticket Model Cost HR and IT Teams?

For Acadia Healthcare, the friction was volume and timing. With two Applicant Tracking Systems (ATSs), the team creates between two and 15 new job codes per week. Each one required a support ticket, back-and-forth clarification when the language wasn’t precise enough, and a wait for the Phenom team to implement the mapping on the platform. It took five to 14 days from submission to live on a change the team needed before the job could surface correctly for candidates. Missing that window meant missed deadlines and roles that weren’t reaching the right audience.

The Aspen Group ran into a different version of the same problem. Using Phenom layered on top of Workday with a Hosted Apply process, the recruitment marketing team depended on accurate UTM source mapping to track where candidates were actually coming from. When new vendors or sources popped up, adding UTM codes required a managed service request — a process that carried a financial component, took substantial time, and forced the team to batch changes together. 

“We would say, okay, in six months we’ll add several UTM source codes all at once,” White revealed. In a fast-moving recruitment marketing environment, that delay created downstream reporting gaps that made it harder to demonstrate program value.

What Changed When Teams Adopted HRIT Hub?

HRIT Hub, part of Phenom HRIT Experience, puts repeatable, low-risk platform actions directly in the hands of qualified users, without requiring a support ticket. For Acadia, that meant job category mapping: adding a new job code, selecting which ATS it applies to, testing in staging, and pushing to production. For The Aspen Group, it meant UTM source mapping: adding new vendor codes on the same day, testing before the campaign goes live, and having accurate source attribution flowing into Workday immediately.

Both teams emphasized the staging environment as the key to building confidence. The ability to make a change, verify it looked right, and then promote to production removed the fear of breaking something. White noted that the apply flow visible to every candidate on the career site is higher stakes than UTM mapping, and having that sandbox made all the difference. “Having the ability to push things into staging and test robustly in staging to feel confident that things were working properly before that first time promoting to production was critical,” White said.

Both leaders keep self-service access tightly controlled. Fayes is the single super user at Acadia; White and one senior specialist own the tool at The Aspen Group. The lesson both landed on? HRIT Hub is most effective when the keys stay with one or two empowered users, not distributed broadly. Self-service isn’t a free-for-all; it’s a way to remove unnecessary support dependencies for the people who know the system best.

Related — Support Governance: Building Long-Term Success

How Much Time Did Self-Service Actually Save?

Fayes is blown away by the results. “A process that took five to 14 days at times takes no more than five minutes. Some days I can do it in two,” she shared. “I think it's very simple.”

Acadia Healthcare

• Job category mapping: 5–14 days per ticket → 2–5 minutes in HRIT Hub

• Dual-ATS mapping (UKG + iCIMS) handled in a single session, no separate tickets per system

The Aspen Group

• UTM source code updates: 30+ days (batched MSRs) → same-day, with new vendor codes added immediately and accurate source attribution flowing into Workday

For White's team, the impact went further than time saved. Sitting at the intersection of marketing and recruiting, the ability to respond to a new vendor request with "we'll knock that out today" shifted how the team was perceived internally and eliminated the cost of managed service requests for changes that now take minutes. With accurate UTM data flowing into Workday, hiring managers and recruitment leadership could finally trust what they were seeing, a downstream win that compounds over time.

Where Are Both Teams Taking Self-Service Next?

White noted that HRIT Hub’s capabilities extend to apply flow configuration, adjusting which fields are required, managing the apply experience, and making changes to the hosted apply form. Both White and Fayes indicated they’re planning to expand their use of those features as they build more confidence with the tool. White is also evaluating Phenom Automated Interview Scheduling in partnership with his Workday counterpart, exploring where automation serves his teams best without duplicating effort across platforms.

HRIT Hub continues to consolidate self-service capabilities (job category mapping, apply flow, SSL certificate management, Service Hub, and APM) into a single access point. For HRIT teams managing complex configurations across multiple vendors and ATSs, the goal to remove support dependencies for low-risk, repeatable tasks is finally attainable. Phenom is proud to be putting that control in the hands of the people closest to the work.

Learn more about Phenom HRIT Experience here.

Already a Phenom customer? Explore how HRIT Hub can help your team move faster with self-service.