Founded in 1915, ACH Child and Family Services brings resources and skills to those facing significant life challenges. In 2025, the Fort Worth, Texas-based nonprofit organization brought hope to more than 31,000 individuals in 12 counties.

Laura Feghali, MPH, HR Director, explains: “Our mission is to protect children and preserve families. All of our work ultimately aims to improve child safety and welfare, prevent abuse and neglect, and tackle issues such as youth homelessness. We always want to keep families together if we can, but in situations where that is impossible, we provide a stable, healing home for children.”

To achieve these objectives, ACH provides multiple programs, including crisis intervention, foster care and adoption, and residential and family services. The success of these initiatives often depends on dedicated employees who are passionate about making a difference. To build the team and retain talent, the organization has relied on Paylocity for several years.

“Using Paylocity has helped us to evolve and optimize our HR operations,” continues Laura. “Over time, our users have become more and more proficient with Paylocity, and we have reshaped and simplified many processes to align with how things work in the platform. Paylocity offers us the tools that we need to succeed as an HR function and to deliver stronger support to the many people that rely on us — both inside the organization and within the wider community.”

 

The Challenge: Out with the Old

As ACH’s needs evolved beyond what previous vendor UKG could support, a search began for a new human capital management (HCM) platform that would help drive retention and enhance processes. 

Understanding the Factors Behind Employee Turnover

ACH employees support children and families who are facing difficult and sometimes tragic circumstances. Inevitably, such demanding work can contribute to high turnover in key roles. “We wanted to understand the precise reasons why people were leaving,” explains Laura. “With that information, we could help our managers support team members more effectively and adapt our processes to increase retention. Ultimately, keeping skilled and experienced people in the organization would have a positive impact on the quality of care that we can deliver.”

Improving Efficiency During the Recruitment Process

ACH hires high numbers of new employees each year to fill skills gaps, and each must complete background checks with the Department of Family and Protective Services. However, the organization’s previous platform created various challenges during the hiring process. “The system didn’t offer strong recruiting functionality,” notes Laura. “In particular, we had to leave the system whenever we wanted to communicate with candidates to schedule phone or on-site interviews. Going forward, we wanted to make things easier for our hiring managers and improve efficiency.”

Searching for a More Supportive Partner 

ACH had also discovered that accessing responsive support from the HCM vendor was close to impossible. “We were getting increasingly frustrated with the customer support from UKG,” says Laura. “We would raise tickets requesting a fix for a specific issue, but then we wouldn’t hear anything back from them for months. The level of service had really declined; as we couldn’t get solutions to our questions, we had to reconsider whether we stayed on the platform.”

 

The Solution: Creating a Passionate Workforce

After assessing the market, ACH selected Paylocity for its powerful recruiting, data analytics, and reporting capabilities, and its ease of use for HR, managers, and employees. 

Digging into HR Trends with Powerful Analytics

With Paylocity’s Data Insights module, ACH can analyze the factors behind employee turnover, as well as other HR trends. “We love that we can export the data from Paylocity with a couple clicks,” explains Laura. “If we’re looking at recent terminations, I can click on employees based on their department or position to see the reasons they gave for why they left. Conversely, I can analyze our hiring patterns and track how long people are staying with us. It’s super useful to have those insights right in front of me rather than having to compile that information manually.”

Simplifying Hiring with Streamlined Communications

Using the Recruiting module, ACH can manage the entire hiring process in one location. “Where our previous platform lacked communication tools, Paylocity gives us multiple options,” continues Laura. “We can email or text candidates with details of pre-screening checks and interview times, without leaving the platform. That makes the process much more seamless.”

Getting Instant Assistance from AI

Laura and the HR team are also harnessing the AI Assistant to search for articles in the PEAK Knowledge Base. “Whenever I need to find how to do something in the platform, I just tap in a search and AI Assistant takes me to the right place,” says Laura. “We’re looking forward to the new AI capabilities that Paylocity is adding, too, especially the option to upload our employee handbook and benefits guide so employees can search them. That will be great.”

Enabling Employees to Connect and Collaborate

Furthermore, employees at ACH are using the Community hub to recognize and celebrate each other’s work. “People started to use Community without any prompting from HR,” notes Laura.

 

The Results: Making a Positive Impact

With Paylocity, ACH has developed more efficient hiring workflows and built a more data-driven model for HR, enabling smarter processes that help to retain talent. 

Using Data to Boost Retention

Guided by the data and reports in Paylocity, ACH can now take steps to improve the employee experience and minimize the risk of turnover. “If I had to highlight one great thing about Paylocity, it would be the Data Insights module,” explains Laura. “The reporting gives us in HR and our team managers hard, clear data on why people are leaving their roles. It enables us to identify the things that we are doing well and the areas for improvement, whether that’s offering people more targeted support or changing our compensation model. These are the things that will help us to stabilize our workforce and ensure we do a better job for families and children in need.”

Saving Time During Every Hiring

By streamlining its recruitment process in Paylocity, ACH has unlocked significant time savings. “As well as being able to communicate with candidates from within the platform, Paylocity has enabled us to create a series of templates for our emails and text messages,” continues Laura. “Those templates eliminate the need for our HR team to rewrite the same messages over and over to hundreds of applicants. Over the course of the year, this saves us a lot of hours.”

Managing HR with an All-in-One Platform

Furthermore, ACH now has one consolidated platform for other core HR tasks, backed up with fast, responsive support from Paylocity. Laura concludes: “We have a few final tasks to set up in Paylocity, but we’re reaching a point where we can manage almost the entire employee lifecycle in one user-friendly system. That is great news for our HR team, as they don’t have to think about which tool to open for different tasks.”