Nobody hires one RBT. You hire RBTs the way you pay rent — on a schedule you didn't choose, forever, while the last cohort is still onboarding. Software built for a hiring event gets in the way of that. Software built for a hiring rate is a different shape.
This page is about that shape: what the volume actually looks like, why the certification funnel leaks, and what a system has to hold so that a candidate doesn't quietly fall out of it.
A live 20-minute look at the product on roles you're hiring for now. Google Meet. No pitch deck.
One statistic decides whether RBT hiring is a project you finish or a process you run.
RBT turnover can sometimes exceed 100% annually. Typical RBT turnover runs 30–75%; corroborating data shows large ABA providers averaged 103.3% all-employee turnover in 2024, mid-size providers 89.3%.
L.E.K. Consulting, "Investing in Autism Therapy: Key Trends Shaping the US ABA Therapy Sector," June 2025. The word "sometimes" is the source's, and it stays.
BACB reports 246,109 active RBT certificants worldwide versus 81,566 BCBAs as of end of 2025 — roughly 3 RBTs for every BCBA, with the RBT population growing about 2.5x faster (25.2% vs. 10.0% year over year).
BACB Certificant Annual Report Data. Worldwide net active credential holders, not US employment.
Read those two together and the operational conclusion writes itself. The RBT bench is the big one, it moves the most, and it refills at a rate you don't control. Hiring for it is not something you get through. It's a standing process — which is an argument for a system, not an argument for trying harder.
That is also why RBT hiring punishes tooling that assumes low volume. A spreadsheet survives one opening. It does not survive the fourth cohort of the year, with two people maintaining it and neither of them sure which tab is current.
If you hire behavior technicians before they certify, you're shepherding people through a pipeline with a real failure rate at each stage.
164,015 RBT exam sittings occurred in 2025 (109,341 first-time, 54,674 retakes); the first-time pass rate is 75%, the retake pass rate 38%.
BACB Certificant Annual Report Data; BACB "2025 RBT Examination Pass Rates for 40-Hour Training Providers." That figure counts testing events, not unique people.
Roughly one in four first-time candidates does not pass. Retakers succeed fewer than four times in ten. Before any of that, candidates must be 18+, hold high-school-level education, pass a criminal background check plus an abuse-registry check, complete 40 hours of qualified training, and pass an initial competency assessment.
BACB RBT Handbook (current 2026 edition); BACB "Guidance for Meeting RBT Requirements During the 2026 Transition," updated 08/2025.
Two hard 90-day rules sit on top of that. The competency assessment must follow the 40-hour training and fall within 90 days of application submission, and the application itself stays active only 90 days before it requires reapplication and a new fee.
To be clear about what that means here: those windows are a description of your world, not a feature this product ships. There is no BT-to-RBT pipeline tracker in SherStaff — it's on the roadmap and it is not built. The reason the funnel belongs on this page is simpler: it is the argument for holding credential state on the person from the day you hire them, because the gap between "hired" and "certified" is where people quietly disappear.
Three things, all live today, in the order an RBT hire actually hits them.
Post openings that don't require RBT certification, hire into them, and track credential status and expiry for those people as it changes. BT, RBT, BCBA, BCBA-D, BCaBA, QBCBA and QASPS are first-class credential types in the system — not fields somebody configured — and verification moves through a defined lifecycle: unverified, pending, verified, failed, expired, revoked, with an immutable audit entry behind every change.
Credential-first screening means expired, mismatched, and missing credentials are flagged before you spend a minute on a file. In a role where the bench turns over at the rate above, the difference between a credential date living in the hiring system and living in someone's calendar is the difference between a flag and a surprise.
Résumés are read and parsed on intake, then scored as applications arrive — 0–100 against the opening's real requirements, reasoning shown factor by factor, weights tunable per organization. Outreach drafts are generated for you and a human approves every single message before it sends. There is no approve-all. That's a design decision, not a missing feature. When someone's worth talking to, they get a self-booking link for the right calendar instead of four days of phone tag.
No BT-to-RBT certification pipeline tracker. The 90-day windows and exam attempts described above are your world, not a module in this product. On the roadmap; not built.
No automated credential verification. Screening is automated. Verification is a person checking the state board or BACB registry and recording it, with an audit trail.
No outbound multi-board job posting. Jobs post to your SherStaff portal; Indeed applications come in through an inbound integration. SherStaff doesn't replace your job board — it makes every applicant you already paid for count.
No personal calendar sync yet (Google/Microsoft). Scheduling runs on in-app availability and tokenized booking, which does work today.
It's a first-class case. You post openings that don't require RBT certification, hire into them, and track credential status and expiry for those people as it changes.
To be exact about what doesn't exist: there is no BT-to-RBT certification pipeline tracker in the product. It's on the roadmap. What's built today is the opening with no certification requirement, plus credential status and expiry on the person.
The order you read them in, and how much of the file you have to open to know. Every applicant is scored 0–100 against that opening's real requirements, factor by factor — credentials, experience, distance and commute, language — with the reasoning shown, and expired, mismatched, or missing credentials flagged before you open anything.
The weights are yours to tune, so the ranking reflects what your service area actually rewards. The score is a starting order, not a verdict; you can read why each number came out the way it did and disagree with it.
Import them from any spreadsheet export (CSV/Excel) and bulk-score the pile against your current openings. The import is staged, with fuzzy duplicate detection and a review queue before anything lands, plus provenance and consent controls that hard-block what shouldn't be contacted.
For an RBT pipeline this is usually the fastest thing in the building. You already paid a job board for those people, and in a role with this much churn the reason most of them said no in March has often expired by September.
No. The 90-day rules are your world, not a feature we ship — we describe them here because they shape how fast you have to move, not because there's a countdown timer in the product.
What the product holds is credential type, verification status through its full lifecycle, and expiry date, with an immutable audit trail behind every change. A deadline tracker for the certification path is on the roadmap and is not built.
Google Meet. No pitch deck. If it isn't a fit, I'll tell you on the call.