About The Stepping Stones Group
The Stepping Stones Group places clinicians and special-education staff across school districts and care settings in the United States. The calendar does not negotiate: a district needs its therapists in place when term starts, not shortly afterwards.
02
They had tried this before
This was not their first screening pilot. The earlier ones had not cleared the bar Stepping Stones set for itself — candidates did not finish the process, and below half completion there is nothing to scale.
So this time the terms came first. One business line, one month, and four conditions agreed before anyone started.
03
The four conditions
Completion above 50%, end to end. Time-to-hire down. Load off the recruiting team — both the recruiters running screening and the coordinators booking interviews. And no drop in the quality of the people being placed.
Three of those are efficiency. The fourth is the one that usually kills automation projects, and it was non-negotiable: the schools Stepping Stones staffs had to be as happy with the candidates as before.
04
All four, inside a month
Completion cleared the 50% bar. Time-to-hire came down. The screening load moved off the recruiters and interview coordination stopped being anyone’s job at all. And the feedback from the schools on the candidates being placed stayed positive.
That was the whole case. The board approved the rollout on results measured against conditions it had set in advance — not on a forecast.
05
The money showed up first
Around $150,000 a year of scheduling coordination cost was released, on our estimate — and the return was visible in the first month of implementation, not in a business case at the end of the year.
From there it scaled roughly 30-fold to the run rate it holds today, across every position and a full pool of recruiters.
What Orbio runs
- Screening and fully automated interview scheduling, across the recruiter pool and every position.
- Deep interviewing, so the screen tests more than availability.
Results
- Every condition the board set for scaling was met inside the pilot month.
- End-to-end completion cleared the 50% bar their earlier pilots had never reached.
- Scheduling coordination fully automated — the work that prompted the pilot.
- Around 30x growth from the pilot to the current weekly run rate.
- A return on the investment visible from the first month of implementation.
The impact
of scheduling coordination cost released
Orbio estimate. The return was visible from the first month.
growth from the pilot to today
Measured on the sustained weekly run rate, not a single peak week.
end-to-end completion
The bar their earlier pilots never cleared.