How Belong used Workable’s AI Recruiting Agent to cut time-to-hire to just 7 Days

A three-person recruiting team at a UK dementia care charity turned to Workable‘s AI Recruiting Agent to source faster, widen its talent pool, and fill a critical leadership role in just seven days.

About Belong: UK Dementia Care Non-Profit

Belong is a UK non-profit specializing in dementia care. The organization operates a network of purpose-built care communities it calls “villages,” alongside a domiciliary service, Belong at Home, that supports people in their own communities. Across both services, Belong employs approximately 1,500 people and has built its reputation on delivering specialist dementia care at a price point that keeps it accessible.

Recruitment at Belong is handled by a lean team of 3 full-time staff who hire everything from care assistants and support workers to registered managers and senior operational leaders. It is a high-volume, high-stakes remit: the Northwest of England is a competitive hiring market for specialist care, and Belong regularly competes against agencies and other providers.

The Recruiting Challenge: Widening the Candidate Pool Without Adding Headcount

Jack Norman-Flanagan inherited Belong’s Workable implementation rather than building it from scratch, and joined the organization with a clear mandate: widen the candidate pool without adding headcount to an already stretched team, and bring more precision to how the team measured its own hiring.

Reach was the priority that mattered most. With a small team managing a constant stream of requisitions across multiple sites, Belong needed a way to source strong candidates, including people who might not come from a traditional care background, without slowing down the process.

Why Belong Chose Workable’s AI Recruiting Agent

When it came to evaluating Workable‘s AI Recruiting Agent, Norman-Flanagan had already benchmarked several tools against other providers on his CEO’s behalf. What set Workable apart was how directly the company described what the agent could and could not yet do.

“Workable gave us an honest answer about exactly what the agent could do, without overselling capabilities it didn’t have yet. 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.”

That balance of automation and human oversight mattered because Belong’s hiring bar is not only about qualifications. The team wanted a tool that could help identify whether a candidate’s values aligned with the work, not just their credentials, and that would flag a person for human review rather than push every applicant through automatically.

Belong also evaluated a competing AI sourcing tool before committing further to Workable, and chose to stay for the depth of the native integration.

“Workable has the home touch we needed, and the integration is there. It’s a winner.”

Implementation: Up and Running in Under 35 Minutes

Adoption did not require a heavy lift. Norman-Flanagan described the setup as intuitive, with minimal training needed before the team began posting live roles with the agent.

“It’s very self-intuitive. There’s not much that goes into it that you wouldn’t expect. 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.”

With templates in place, the team now posts a role through the AI Agent in under five minutes. Belong has used it to post at least ten roles to date.

Results: Faster Hires, Broader Talent Pool, and Stronger Candidate Experience

7-Day Fill for a Head of Operations Role

The agent has already directly contributed to at least three hires, including a Head of Operations role, typically one of the harder positions to fill, that went from posting to offer in just seven days.

Candidates from Outside the Care Sector

Just as important to Norman-Flanagan is the breadth of talent the agent surfaces. Belong has found strong candidates from outside the care sector entirely, people the team’s own sourcing might not have considered, who still bring the transferable skills and values-based fit the role requires.

“It gives us a broad range of candidates, which is nice. 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.”

Positive Feedback from Senior-Level Candidates

Perhaps the most unexpected signal of success has come from candidates themselves. Norman-Flanagan has heard directly, and repeatedly, from senior-level applicants who came away impressed by the quality of their interaction with the agent.

“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. 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.”

New Recruiter Fully Trained in Under 35 Minutes

The impact extends to the recruiting team’s own ramp-up time. A new hire joining Belong’s recruitment function was fully trained on Workable, and pre-screening candidates independently, in under 35 minutes.

“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.”

Cleaner Hiring Data with Workable Enterprise Reporting

Alongside the agent, Belong upgraded to Workable‘s Enterprise plan for native, in-house reporting. That change let the team build custom dashboards on demand, and in the process, catch data that had been quietly distorting its numbers: candidates disqualified from one role whose applications were carried forward into a later posting, inflating how long their hiring journey appeared to take.

“We had a couple of individuals whose data was inflating our time-to-hire figures without us knowing it. Being able to pinpoint that with the reporting helps us streamline things internally.”

What’s Next: Extending AI Into Compliance and Background Checks

Belong has secured leadership approval to purchase additional AI credits and plans to allocate them across its different services to match its multi-site charity budgeting structure. Looking further ahead, Norman-Flanagan wants to extend the agent’s role deeper into the hiring process, including compliance steps handled today through third-party providers, such as reference and background checks.

“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. Benchmark that against a role costing twenty thousand pounds a year, and plenty of organizations would take that trade.”

For a lean recruiting team supporting 1,500 employees across a growing charity, an AI Recruiting Agent that hires faster, reaches wider, and still knows when to bring in a person has made Workable a foundation the team intends to keep building on.