Holli Beth Clauser Has Overcome Life’s Obstacles, Now Helps ABA Owners With Workforce Management

As a small child, Holli Beth Clauser did not speak. She had apraxia, a speech disorder, and she is autistic. Today, the Chicago-area founder runs ABA C.A.R.E.S., whose annual summit brings ABA owners, clinical directors, and HR leaders together to work on how they hire and keep staff.

“Resilience, to me, is not optional; it is my ongoing commitment to move forward and use my voice to help others find and use theirs,” she told CanvasRebel Magazine in December 2023.

Her argument, made on podcasts and to nearly 18,000 LinkedIn followers, is that staff turnover is a clinical issue. When a technician leaves, she said on In the Field: The ABA Podcast in October 2025, it has “an impact on the child’s consistency of care.”

A Career She Did Not Plan

“I absolutely did not plan on being in staffing, or hiring, or the HR realm at all,” Clauser said on the same episode. “In fact, I didn’t even know that ABA was a space for me.”

Her way in was her own family. She is the parent of two neurodivergent children, now adults, who had medical and behavioral needs, and she has said she had to find the right fit in services for each of them. As a single mother, she wanted to work in ABA but held off because clients needed evening sessions she could not cover. She worked elsewhere first, as director of childcare at a fitness club, where she did all the hiring, and as an office manager at a large Chicago insurance broker. Her work with children began in 2005 at NSSRA, in a self-contained classroom, and she worked in schools before going to AHSS.

In October 2014, she started at Invo Healthcare as a registered behavior technician (RBT), delivering one-on-one sessions to children with severe behavior and profound autism in northern Illinois.

In 2016, she moved into training new RBTs. “It was very hard for me to not be one-on-one with the children, and I still miss it,” she said. In training, she saw a pattern. She remembers thinking, “Oh, there are a lot of people that are in my training right now that have no idea what they signed up for.” She began reaching out to HR and recruiters, and those conversations led her into recruiting: first as a clinical recruiter and senior recruiter at Invo, then as talent acquisition manager and acting vice president of talent acquisition at Ascend Behavior Partners from 2021 to 2022.

Hiring With the Hard Parts First

Clauser describes her approach as “being an educator instead of being a salesperson.” “I start by saying, this is not babysitting,” she said. She walks candidates through the hardest parts of a specific role, such as a four-year-old client with a high rate of biting, and treats vague answers like “yeah, I think so” as usually a no. Before a candidate commits, she asks them to sleep on it.

Candor costs applicants, and she accepts that. When a client posted a BCBA opening that listed the real evening and weekend hours, applications fell; she filled the job anyway, with far fewer interviews. At a Colorado center, she found candidates being turned down for availability that met client needs. After she raised it, leadership changed who made those hiring calls, and the center saw higher retention over the next year or two, by her account.

“So my argument is that they’re leaving anyway. Our turnover is awful, and so we can’t keep doing the same and expect it to work.” – Holli Beth Clauser, In the Field: The ABA Podcast (2025)

She formed her first firm, Behavioral Talent Consulting, in June 2022, launched it that November, and signed her first major client in February 2023, she told CanvasRebel. She says she still turns business away: “If it doesn’t align with my values, I’m okay saying no.”

Building ABA C.A.R.E.S.

Clauser has led ABA C.A.R.E.S. Staffing since August 2023. The letters stand for Culture, Advocacy, Retention, Employee Relations, and Systems. She calls the summit “my passion project” and says those subjects were “not something that is talked about and focused on at any conference” when she started. Her shorthand for the whole thing is “the people side of ABA.”

The 2026 summit ran four days, August 4 to 7, at the Boston Marriott Long Wharf and by livestream. It offered four tracks (executive, people operations, career counseling, and clinical leadership), up to 32 continuing education credits, and free on-site childcare. Western Michigan University’s Heather McGee gave the keynote, a talk titled “It’s Not Your People, It’s the System.” The company describes itself as “proudly autistic-owned and operated.”

Clauser asks speakers to commit to a deliverable, something attendees can take back to work on Monday, such as a checklist. The feedback she values most, she said, is attendees telling her, “I felt like I had a voice here.”

AT A GLANCE

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