Belong, a prominent UK non-profit specializing in dementia care, has successfully leveraged Workable’s AI Recruiting Agent to dramatically accelerate its hiring process, broaden its talent pool, and secure a critical Head of Operations leadership role in an unprecedented seven days. This strategic adoption of artificial intelligence by a lean, three-person recruiting team underscores a significant paradigm shift in talent acquisition within the challenging and competitive UK care sector, demonstrating how advanced technology can enhance efficiency, improve candidate experience, and uphold values-based recruitment.
The Evolving Landscape of UK Dementia Care and Belong’s Unique Model
Belong operates at the forefront of specialist dementia care in the United Kingdom, distinguished by its innovative network of purpose-built residential communities, affectionately termed "villages." These environments are designed to foster independence, dignity, and a sense of community for residents living with dementia. Complementing its village model, Belong also provides domiciliary services through "Belong at Home," extending its specialized support to individuals within their own communities. Collectively, Belong employs approximately 1,500 dedicated professionals, ranging from care assistants and support workers to registered managers and senior operational leaders. The organization has meticulously built its reputation on delivering high-quality, specialist dementia care at a price point that maintains accessibility, a crucial factor in the often-cost-prohibitive care market.
The UK’s demographic landscape presents an ever-growing demand for high-quality dementia care. With an aging population, the number of people living with dementia is projected to rise significantly, placing immense pressure on care providers to recruit and retain a skilled workforce. The care sector, particularly in regions like the Northwest of England where Belong has a strong presence, is characterized by intense competition for talent. Non-profit organizations like Belong frequently contend with private agencies and other care providers, often with larger budgets, to attract and secure the best candidates. This environment necessitates agile, effective, and innovative recruitment strategies.
Navigating a High-Stakes, High-Volume Recruitment Environment
Belong’s recruitment operations are managed by a remarkably lean team of just three full-time staff. This small but dedicated unit shoulders the substantial responsibility of fulfilling a constant stream of requisitions across multiple sites and diverse roles, from entry-level care positions to highly specialized senior leadership roles. The stakes are inherently high; the quality of care delivered by Belong is directly linked to the caliber and compassion of its employees. Therefore, securing the right talent, swiftly and efficiently, is paramount to maintaining its esteemed standards and fulfilling its charitable mission.
Jack Norman-Flanagan, who inherited Belong’s existing Workable implementation, arrived with a clear and ambitious mandate: to significantly broaden the candidate pool without necessitating an increase in the already stretched recruitment headcount, and simultaneously to introduce greater precision and accountability into the team’s hiring metrics. The imperative was clear: increase reach and efficiency without compromising quality or the organization’s core values. In a sector where staff turnover can be high and specialized skills are in demand, the ability to source strong candidates, including those from non-traditional care backgrounds, without slowing down the recruitment pipeline, became an urgent priority. Traditional manual sourcing methods were proving insufficient to meet these escalating demands.
The Strategic Pivot to AI: Why Workable’s AI Recruiting Agent Stood Out
Recognizing the need for a technological edge, Norman-Flanagan embarked on a thorough evaluation of various recruitment tools, including competing AI sourcing solutions. His assessment, conducted on behalf of Belong’s CEO, sought not just powerful features but also transparency and a true partnership approach. What ultimately distinguished Workable’s AI Recruiting Agent from other offerings was its candid and precise articulation of its capabilities and limitations.
"Workable gave us an honest answer about exactly what the agent could do, without overselling capabilities it didn’t have yet," Norman-Flanagan stated. "I like knowing exactly what it will produce and what interaction it will have. And it will still prompt a person for a response if a candidate doesn’t hit the benchmark. That matters to us, because we’re trying to maintain a values-based recruitment process." This transparency was a critical factor. In an era where AI can often feel like a "black box," Workable’s approach resonated with Belong’s need for controlled automation that complements human judgment rather than replacing it entirely.
The balance between automation and human oversight was particularly crucial for Belong. Hiring for dementia care requires more than just a matching of qualifications; it demands a deep alignment with the organization’s values, empathy, and a genuine commitment to person-centered care. The recruitment team needed a tool that could intelligently pre-screen for both technical skills and cultural fit, and critically, flag candidates for human review when their profiles suggested potential, even if they didn’t perfectly match every predefined benchmark. This ensured that the integrity of Belong’s values-based recruitment process was maintained, preventing potentially excellent, albeit unconventional, candidates from being overlooked by rigid automated filters.
Beyond the candid assessment of its AI capabilities, Workable’s deep native integration within Belong’s existing recruitment infrastructure was another decisive factor. Norman-Flanagan noted, "Workable has the home touch we needed, and the integration is there. It’s a winner." This seamless integration meant minimal disruption to existing workflows, accelerated adoption, and ensured that the AI agent could function as a true extension of the recruitment team rather than a disparate, siloed tool. This contrasts with the challenges often faced when integrating third-party AI solutions, which can require significant development effort and compromise data flow.
Rapid Implementation and Intuitive Adoption
One of the most impressive aspects of Belong’s journey with the Workable AI Recruiting Agent was the speed and ease of its implementation. Adoption did not necessitate a heavy lift or extensive training, a common barrier to new technology integration, especially for resource-constrained non-profits. Norman-Flanagan described the setup as remarkably intuitive, with the team quickly becoming proficient enough to post live roles with the agent.
"It’s very self-intuitive. There’s not much that goes into it that you wouldn’t expect," he explained. "Prompting is prompting: you give it the information it needs and it gives you what you want. It does exactly what it says on the tin, so it’s as easy as you make it." This testament to Workable’s user-friendly design highlights the importance of accessible technology in enabling smaller teams to leverage advanced tools effectively. With established templates, the team can now post a new role through the AI Agent in under five minutes, a dramatic reduction in administrative overhead. To date, Belong has successfully utilized the agent to post at least ten diverse roles, demonstrating its versatility and consistent reliability. This ease of use also significantly reduces the learning curve for new team members, as evidenced by their rapid onboarding.
Transformative Results: Speed, Diversity, and Candidate Delight
The impact of Workable’s AI Recruiting Agent on Belong’s operations has been multifaceted and profound, yielding benefits that extend far beyond mere efficiency gains.
7-Day Fill for a Head of Operations Role: Perhaps the most striking success story is the expedited hiring for a critical Head of Operations role. This senior leadership position, typically one of the most challenging and time-consuming to fill within any organization, especially in a specialized sector like care, went from initial posting to a successful offer in an astounding seven days. Industry benchmarks for leadership roles often range from 45 to 90 days, making Belong’s achievement truly exceptional. This rapid fulfillment ensured minimal disruption to strategic initiatives and operational continuity, a vital outcome for a growing charity. The agent has directly contributed to at least three hires, underscoring its tangible value.
Broadening the Talent Pool Beyond Traditional Boundaries: Beyond speed, the AI agent has proven instrumental in achieving Norman-Flanagan’s core mandate: widening the candidate pool. It has enabled Belong to identify and engage strong candidates from entirely outside the traditional care sector – individuals whom the recruitment team’s conventional sourcing methods might not have identified. These candidates, while lacking direct care experience, possess highly valuable transferable skills and, crucially, exhibit the values-based fit essential for Belong’s mission. "It gives us a broad range of candidates, which is nice," Norman-Flanagan remarked. "We’ve had people from outside our specific field who still match the requirement and are hungry and values-driven. It surfaces candidates that other recruiters might not pick up." This ability to tap into diverse talent pools is critical for innovation and resilience in a rapidly evolving sector.
Unprecedented Positive Candidate Experience: One of the most unexpected, yet powerful, signals of success has come directly from the candidates themselves. Norman-Flanagan has received consistent and positive feedback from senior-level applicants who were genuinely impressed by the quality and depth of their interactions with the AI agent. These C-suite candidates, initially skeptical of conversing with an automated system, reported that the AI prompted them to consider aspects of the role and their own experience they hadn’t previously thought about, ultimately helping them craft stronger, more thoughtful applications. "We’ve had C-suite candidates come back to me and say they weren’t expecting much from a conversation with an AI agent, but it turned out to be a genuinely good one," he shared. "It prompted them to think about things they hadn’t considered and helped them build a stronger application. That’s consistent feedback we’ve had from more than one senior-level candidate, and it’s not something I’ve seen from any other platform." This demonstrates Workable’s AI agent not just as an efficiency tool, but as a sophisticated engagement platform that enhances the employer brand and elevates the candidate journey, particularly for high-value talent.
Accelerated Recruiter Onboarding: The benefits extend internally, significantly impacting the recruitment team’s own efficiency. A new hire joining Belong’s recruitment function was fully trained on Workable and independently pre-screening candidates in less than 35 minutes. This incredibly rapid ramp-up time represents substantial savings in training resources and allows new team members to become productive almost immediately. "Everything I’ve worked with so far has been a pleasant experience. That’s not something I could always say implementing other ATS platforms in the past," Norman-Flanagan noted, underscoring the platform’s user-friendliness compared to previous experiences.
Cleaner Hiring Data with Workable Enterprise Reporting
Beyond the AI agent, Belong’s upgrade to Workable’s Enterprise plan has brought significant improvements to its data integrity and reporting capabilities. This strategic move enabled the team to build custom dashboards on demand, offering unparalleled visibility into their hiring metrics. Through this enhanced reporting, Belong uncovered a subtle yet significant issue: candidates who had been disqualified from one role had their applications inadvertently carried forward into later postings. This practice quietly distorted their time-to-hire figures, making the recruitment journey appear longer than it truly was.
"We had a couple of individuals whose data was inflating our time-to-hire figures without us knowing it," Norman-Flanagan explained. "Being able to pinpoint that with the reporting helps us streamline things internally." This ability to identify and rectify data anomalies is crucial for any organization, but especially for non-profits that rely on accurate metrics to demonstrate impact, justify resource allocation, and continuously optimize their operations. Clean, reliable hiring data empowers strategic decision-making, allowing Belong to refine its processes and allocate its lean resources more effectively.
The Road Ahead: Extending AI into Compliance and Background Checks
Encouraged by the resounding success, Belong has secured leadership approval to purchase additional AI credits. These credits will be strategically allocated across its various services, aligning with the charity’s multi-site budgeting structure. Looking further into the future, Norman-Flanagan envisions an even more expansive role for the AI agent, extending its capabilities deeper into the hiring process, particularly for compliance-related steps currently managed through third-party providers. This includes automating critical, yet often time-consuming, elements such as reference and background checks.
The potential for further automation in these areas presents a compelling economic and operational case. "If it could take a candidate all the way through to reference and background checks, with the same human prompts along the way, I would consider redirecting a role’s budget toward that instead," Norman-Flanagan posited. "Benchmark that against a role costing twenty thousand pounds a year, and plenty of organizations would take that trade." This forward-thinking approach highlights a broader trend towards end-to-end HR automation, where AI streamlines not just sourcing and initial screening, but the entire candidate lifecycle, freeing up human resources for more strategic and empathetic interactions. For a lean recruiting team supporting 1,500 employees across a growing charity, an AI Recruiting Agent that not only hires faster and reaches wider but also intelligently integrates human oversight has solidified Workable as a foundational technology upon which Belong intends to continue building its future talent acquisition strategy. This case study from Belong exemplifies how mission-driven organizations can harness the power of artificial intelligence to overcome significant recruitment challenges, optimize operational efficiency, and ultimately, enhance their capacity to deliver vital services.
