Summary

Our collaboration with Stepful demonstrates how advanced AI interviewing technology can revolutionize the admissions process for workforce development programs, enabling organizations to efficiently assess thousands of candidates while maintaining quality and setting proper expectations.

At Ribbon, we believe meaningful connections and targeted engagement drive transformational impact. Our collaboration with Stepful shows how advanced interviewing technology helped them scale their admissions process from 40 to 2,500 applicants while ensuring students understand the realities of healthcare careers before committing to training programs.

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About Stepful

Stepful is a four-year-old company with a mission to provide pathways into allied health careers for learners and populations that don't typically get opportunities for higher education. The company offers training programs in medical assisting, pharmacy technician, and patient care roles, with students completing four to six months of online training followed by clinical internships. With over 25,000 active learners monthly, Stepful has also launched an enterprise division that partners with hospitals, health systems, and nonprofits to support workforce planning and train contract workers interested in healthcare careers.

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The challenge

When Stepful began working with third-party funders whose contract staff came from non-healthcare backgrounds—such as warehouse associates and retail workers—they discovered a critical problem. Many of these workers didn't understand what it meant to work in healthcare, including patient care responsibilities, constantly talking to patients, calming them down, and dealing with difficult human situations.

In their first cohort, many students dropped out once they realized these realities. For the second cohort, Stepful decided to implement a light admissions process, despite not traditionally running admissions (they believe anyone who has passed high school and is interested in allied health can succeed).

Their admissions process tested for two things:

1. English communication ability - ensuring students could understand instructors during live classes that happen twice a week
2. Expectation setting - having conversations about role realities, work environments, externship time commitments, and study requirements (10 hours per week)

The manual process worked well for about 40 students, with coaches joining Zoom calls for 15-20 minute conversations. However, when they received about 2,500 applications, there was no way to build the human capacity needed for individual interviews.

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Ribbon's solution

Stepful's head of people had been having conversations with the Ribbon team about direct recruiting. When the admissions challenge arose, he connected the team with Ribbon as a potential solution.

Stepful found Ribbon to be "really easy to use" and "almost like a self-serve recruitment tool" that could serve as a light admissions process. The platform enabled them to:

• Scale interview capacity: Handle 2,500 applications compared to their previous maximum of 40 manual interviews
• Assess communication skills: Evaluate English speaking ability to ensure students could participate in live instruction
• Set proper expectations: Conduct meaningful conversations about healthcare career realities and program requirements
• Distinguish genuine interest: Separate students who simply fill out forms from those with genuine intent to join and complete the program
• Standardize assessment: Eliminate variance between different human interviewers while maintaining conversational engagement

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Key results

Ribbon's interviewing technology transformed Stepful's admissions process, achieving impressive outcomes:

• 62x increase in application processing capacity: Successfully handled 2,500 applications compared to their previous maximum of 40 manual interviews.
• Eliminated assessment variance: Standardized evaluation process removed concerns about inconsistency between different human interviewers and graders.
• Streamlined operations: Avoided time-consuming training of graders and interviewers, plus ongoing standardization efforts.
• Enhanced candidate insights: Better ability to distinguish genuine interest from surface-level applications.

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Looking Ahead: Expanding Use Cases

Stepful is exploring additional applications for Ribbon technology. Their biggest planned expansion is using AI interviews to make students more job-ready.

With approximately 1,500 students actively working to find jobs at any given time, Stepful identified that many students perform well in clinical settings but lack experience with professional interviews. Since this population has "never been really in professional settings," Stepful plans to use Ribbon interviews to provide practice for candidates preparing for final job interviews.

This initiative was scheduled to begin after their jobs lead returned from a six-week personal trip.

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"I actually thought it would feel really mechanical and uncomfortable for students. I think that was my one big concern from a student experience point of view... But I feel a lot less skeptical and a lot more willing to try now. The tool was really easy to use. It was almost like a self serve recruitment tool."

— Uttara Gharpure, Head of Enterprise Operations, Stepful

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The Impact

This partnership demonstrates how AI-powered interviewing enables workforce development organizations to scale their admissions processes while maintaining quality assessment. By replacing manual interviews with automated conversational AI, Stepful successfully handled 62 times more applicants while ensuring students enter programs with realistic expectations about healthcare careers.

The success positions Stepful to continue expanding their enterprise partnerships, knowing they have scalable infrastructure to handle large-volume admissions efficiently.