About Ribera Salud
Ribera runs more than 100 hospitals, clinics and care centres, with 9,200 professionals across seven Spanish autonomous communities and six countries. Clinical hiring is careful by necessity, and slow for exactly the same reason. A vacancy that stays open is a rota somebody else absorbs — and, eventually, a patient who waits.
01
Five people, 4,300 selection processes
Twenty-seven thousand applications a year arrived through Ribera's jobs site. Behind them sat a recruitment team of five, running 4,300 selection processes across the group.
Turnover ran at 15%, and above 20% in some categories and centres. The instinct in clinical hiring — read everything, speak to everyone, check carefully — is the right one. It is also the one thing five people cannot do twenty-seven thousand times a year.
02
They gave the agent a name of their own
Ribera calls her MarIA. Candidates speak to her on WhatsApp or by phone, in their own words, at whatever hour their shift happens to end: of the interviews she ran, 78% were over WhatsApp and 22% by phone.
The naming matters more than it sounds. MarIA says she is AI in the first message and hands over to the team whenever anyone asks — but she sits inside Ribera's process rather than beside it. Two thousand one hundred interviews in four months, all within the group's own recruitment flow.
03
July to October 2025
In four months, pre-selection interviews rose 63% against the pre-Orbio baseline. Not because anyone worked longer hours, but because the first conversation stopped waiting for someone to be free to have it.
Ninety-eight per cent of candidates rated the interaction positively. In a sector where the good ones are hired within days, being the organisation that answers first is most of the advantage.
04
The hours came back
More than 120 hours a month of administrative load moved off the recruitment team, and around 70% of the queries that used to need a person are now resolved inside the conversation itself.
The team did not shrink. The volume grew and the team stopped drowning in it — which, for a group still adding centres, is the only kind of scale that holds.
What Orbio runs
- Automated CV screening and initial interviews, over WhatsApp and phone.
- Support through onboarding, including answering candidates' frequently asked questions.
- Identification of critical alerts that need human intervention.
- Continuous interaction with candidates and employees, with full traceability of every exchange.
Results
- 63% increase in pre-selection interviews.
- 2,100 interviews conducted through the agent — 78% over WhatsApp, 22% by phone.
- More than 2,000 applications a month managed autonomously, and almost 7,000 evaluations in the period.
- Under two minutes from receiving an application to evaluation and first contact.
- 80% increase in the process completion rate, and a 60% reduction in response time to queries.
- More than a third of interactions happen outside the team's working hours.
- 98% of candidates rate the interaction positively.
- Extended from Spain to Portugal, and from hiring into onboarding.
The impact
+63%
pre-selection interviews
July–October 2025, against the pre-Orbio baseline.
98%
of candidates rate the interaction positively
Reported by Ribera across the deployment.
+120 h
per month returned to the recruitment team
Administrative load absorbed by the agent.
2,100
interviews through the agent
78% over WhatsApp, 22% by phone, in four months.
What's next
Ribera has published its own account of the project. These are the client's figures, in the client's words — which is the only way a healthcare case study is worth reading.
In the client's own words
Ribera Salud has published their own account of this work.
Read Ribera's case study on MarIA ↗