Revolutionizing Care Sector Recruitment: How UK Non-Profit Belong Cut Hiring Times to Seven Days Using AI

LONDON — In the high-stakes, competitive landscape of specialized health and social care, finding the right talent has long been a formidable challenge. For UK dementia care charity Belong, managing a high-volume recruitment pipeline with a lean, three-person team meant constantly battling against costly recruitment agencies and a tight labor market in the Northwest of England.

However, a strategic pivot toward cutting-edge artificial intelligence has fundamentally transformed how the organization scales its workforce. By integrating Workable’s AI Recruiting Agent, Belong successfully expanded its talent pool, captured top-tier leadership talent from outside the traditional care sector, and streamlined a critical executive search—taking a Head of Operations role from initial posting to a signed offer in a remarkable seven days.

Main Facts: The Intersection of Care and Cutting-Edge HR Tech

Belong is a prominent UK non-profit specializing in advanced dementia care. The organization operates a network of purpose-built residential communities—affectionately and functionally termed “villages”—alongside “Belong at Home,” a specialized domiciliary service supporting individuals living independently in their local communities. Altogether, the non-profit employs approximately 1,500 people.

Despite its expansive operational footprint and vital community mission, recruitment is managed by a tight-knit team of just three full-time professionals. This core team is responsible for sourcing everything from frontline care assistants and support workers to registered managers and senior operational executives.

Faced with a fiercely competitive regional hiring market, Belong’s leadership needed a solution that would dramatically widen the candidate reach and precision of their hiring process without expanding headcount. The answer came in the form of Workable’s AI Recruiting Agent, a tool that balanced automated efficiency with essential human oversight, preserving the charity’s core values while slashing time-to-hire metrics.

Chronology: From Legacy Constraints to Rapid AI Adoption

The journey toward automated, values-driven recruitment at Belong followed a deliberate, highly efficient trajectory steered by Jack Norman-Flanagan, who inherited the organization’s Workable infrastructure with a clear mandate to optimize operations.

Phase 1: Identifying the Sourcing Bottleneck

Upon stepping into his role, Norman-Flanagan assessed the charity’s recruitment framework. The primary obstacle was clear: reach. Managing a continuous stream of multi-site requisitions with a three-person team left little room for proactive sourcing. Belong needed to cast a wider net to capture candidates—including those possessing transferable skills from outside the traditional care sector—without placing an unsustainable burden on internal staff.

Phase 2: Benchmarking and Selecting Workable

Before committing, Norman-Flanagan rigorously benchmarked several AI sourcing tools against competing providers on behalf of the organization’s CEO. What ultimately separated Workable from the competition was transparency and depth of integration.

Rather than leaning on overhyped, generalized marketing promises, Workable provided an honest assessment of its agent’s current capabilities and limitations. Crucially, the system retained human-in-the-loop checkpoints, prompting human intervention whenever a candidate missed a baseline benchmark. This capability protected Belong’s values-based recruitment model, ensuring culture-fit remained a central pillar.

Phase 3: Frictionless Implementation

Adoption of the technology proved to be exceptionally rapid. Setting up the system required virtually no heavy technical lifting or extensive training overhead. Norman-Flanagan noted that the intuitive nature of the platform allowed the team to begin posting live roles in under 35 minutes. To date, the charity has successfully utilized the agent to publish at least ten active roles.

Supporting Data: Measurable Impact Across the Board

The integration of Workable’s AI agent and enterprise reporting suite yielded immediate, quantifiable improvements across Belong’s entire recruitment ecosystem.

Operational Metrics and Hiring Velocity

• 7-Day Executive Placement: The AI agent directly contributed to at least three major hires, highlighted by the rapid placement of a Head of Operations—historically one of the most difficult administrative and operational roles to fill—which went from public posting to a formal offer in just seven days.
• Rapid Onboarding: A newly hired recruiter joining Belong’s HR department was fully trained on the Workable platform and independently pre-screening candidates in under 35 minutes.
• Data Integrity and Enterprise Reporting: By upgrading to Workable’s Enterprise plan, Belong gained access to native, in-house reporting dashboards. This transparency uncovered hidden data distortions—such as disqualified candidates from past roles whose lingering metrics artificially inflated time-to-hire averages—allowing the team to clean up its internal analytics.

Official Responses: Insights from Leadership and Candidates

The success of Belong’s AI integration is best captured through the firsthand perspectives of its HR leadership and the surprising reactions of high-level applicants.

Jack Norman-Flanagan emphasized the importance of honesty and precision in HR technology:

"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."

On the ease of adoption, Norman-Flanagan added:

"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."

Perhaps the most compelling endorsement came from senior-level executives passing through the pipeline, who praised the interactive nature of the AI screening:

"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."

Commenting on the broader talent pool unlocked by the tool, Norman-Flanagan noted:

"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."

Implications: The Future of Non-Profit Workforce Management

The successful deployment of AI within a specialist care charity carries broad implications for the wider non-profit and healthcare sectors, where operational budgets are traditionally tight and talent shortages are chronic.

By proving that artificial intelligence can successfully screen for intangible qualities like empathy, drive, and values alignment—rather than purely relying on traditional resume keywords—Belong has dismantled the false dichotomy between automated efficiency and human-centric care.

Furthermore, the charity’s success has unlocked new budgetary confidence. Leadership has already approved the purchase of additional AI credits, strategically allocating them across various care services to match multi-site charity budgets.

Looking ahead, Belong aims to push the boundaries of automation even further. Norman-Flanagan envisions expanding the agent’s responsibilities deep into post-application compliance workflows, such as reference checks and background vetting, which are currently managed by external third-party providers.

For a lean recruiting team supporting 1,500 employees across a growing network of specialized care villages, Workable has evolved from a simple applicant tracking system into a foundational technological partner—proving that smart, honest automation can successfully alleviate the pressures of high-stakes care recruitment without ever sacrificing the human touch.