When Zach Piester lost his recruiting team and budget, the hiring work stayed. ProCo still had 55 openings to fill, from hourly clinical support staff to advanced providers and executives. Zach, the company's director of talent acquisition, was now managing them on his own.

ProCo supports five businesses that collectively operate 24 orthopedic clinics in the greater Atlanta area. The organization has roughly 450 employees and makes about 150 hires a year. Zach needed a way to keep candidates moving while giving hiring managers enough information to make a decision.

With Ribbon running first-round interviews, ProCo brought average time to hire for non-senior leadership roles from roughly 33 days to 11. Its quickest hire took five days. Zach credits that change to both Ribbon and hiring managers keeping up with their review commitments.

The results at a glance

• Average time to hire fell from roughly 33 days to 11 for non-senior leadership roles, with timely hiring-manager reviews.
• The quickest hire took five days.
• About 1,200 Ribbon interviews were completed over five months.
• Zach estimated roughly 300 hours of labor saved in the hourly hiring process.

One recruiter, 55 openings

Zach joined ProCo to modernize how the company attracted and retained talent. Much of the existing process ran through spreadsheets and manual administration. A team of four or five people had been moving candidates through that process.

"I lost the team, lost the budget."

Zach needed to manage executive searches alongside the daily demand for clinical staff, without personally conducting every first conversation.

Ribbon gave him a way to standardize those interviews. Candidates could answer a consistent set of questions, and hiring managers could review the recording and scores alongside the resume. At the time of our interview, ProCo had deployed Ribbon across about 15 or 16 roles, primarily hourly positions and frontline managers.

A first interview that managers can act on

The 11-day hiring average depended on what happened after a candidate finished a Ribbon interview. Zach was explicit about that: hiring managers still needed to review candidates and respond on time. Ribbon supplied the first-round evidence; the team kept the next steps moving.

That also changed where Zach spent his own time. For a senior HR manager search, for example, the initial Ribbon interview gave the hiring team enough information to move a candidate into later conversations without waiting for Zach to repeat the first screen. That search had a longer cycle than ProCo's frontline roles, but the same approach removed a step from his calendar.

"I don't want to be the bottleneck."

Across five months, the roughly 1,200 interviews added up to an estimated 300 hours saved in ProCo's hourly hiring process. Zach could spend that time on later-stage conversations and the searches that needed his direct attention.

Trust came from reviewing the evidence

ProCo's process evolved as Zach learned what Ribbon's scores meant in practice. Early on, the team reviewed resumes first and invited the candidates who passed that review to a Ribbon interview.

Custom scoring became especially useful. Zach could write questions around a role's requirements, compare the answers, and adjust the questions when hiring managers wanted to put more weight on a particular skill or kind of experience. He found the scores reflected what he saw in resume reviews and human interviews.

The team still reviewed every candidate's resume and video. Scores helped them decide where to spend more time and what to look at closely.

As their confidence grew, they began offering a Ribbon interview to everyone who applied for a role. The interview became the starting point for review, supported by the resume. Zach knew his own narrow resume criteria could miss people, and he wanted hiring managers to see more candidates who might be worth a conversation.

Seeing where else a candidate could fit

Someone who applied for a front-desk position might describe experience in a Ribbon interview that made them a better match for a different opening. Zach and another senior recruiter were spotting those possibilities as they reviewed recordings.

Zach was also surprised by the conversations themselves. Ribbon followed up on answers in much the same way he would during a screen, rather than simply working through a fixed questionnaire.

"It's been very, very natural."

From a trial to part of the hiring process

Zach initially expected Ribbon to be a useful tool that would help the team work faster. He hadn't expected it to become so central.

"I did not expect it to become a critical part of the work."

By the time we spoke, ProCo was choosing a new applicant tracking system. Integration with Ribbon was one of Zach's early requirements for vendors. The team still handled invitations manually and worked through spreadsheets, so connecting those steps was the next practical improvement.

Hiring with a small recruiting team? See how Ribbon can help with your first-round interviews.

Interview with Zach Piester, September 3, 2026.