At a glance

• ‍Problem: Someone applies to work as a care assistant on a Saturday evening. The call back comes after the weekend, by which time the moment has passed.
• ‍Solution: Ringtime calls the applicant within minutes, runs the full screening conversation and emails the result to the Exxtra team.
• ‍Result: In the first full week, 36 applicants were processed and 20 fully screened, which freed 4.5 hours of staff time in that week alone.

Most applicants are someone's neighbour

Exxtra is a recognised Belgian sharing-economy platform for care part of the Trixxo Group. It connects people who need daily help and support with the assistants who provide it and handles everything around that: the agreements, the payments, the sector rules. Around 2,500 people receiving support with around 6,000 active assistants.

The unusual part is who applies. An assistant is often someone's neighbour, or a family member, or a friend who has decided to make the help official and get paid for it. They are not working through a list of job applications. They filled in one form, once, about one specific situation, and they are waiting to hear whether it can go ahead.

That changes what a slow reply costs. A candidate who does not hear back from a staffing agency applies somewhere else. Someone who wanted to start supporting a person they know, and heard nothing until Tuesday, is left wondering whether the arrangement is happening at all.

Applications arrive when the office is closed

Applications arrive whenever people have a free moment, which is largely outside office hours. The Exxtra team picked them up during the working day and called back in order.

For an applicant, that meant a wait of a day, and over a weekend it could be longer. The screening conversation itself is not complicated. It confirms who the person is, what support they can offer, when they are available, and what they still need to arrange. It is exactly the kind of conversation that loses its value by being late.

Call the applicant, email the team

Exxtra built the flow deliberately simple and the reason is worth stating.

Their applicant system is an in-house build that is due to be replaced in 2027. Wiring a deep integration into a system with a known end date would have been work with a short life. So the setup avoids it. When an assistant registers, Exxtra's platform fires a webhook to Ringtime. The agent, ELLA, calls the applicant straight away and runs the screening conversation in Dutch. The result goes back to the Exxtra team by email, and a person takes it from there.

No migration, no new system for the team to learn and nothing that has to be unpicked when the platform is replaced next year.

36 applicants in week one, 20 fully screened

In the first full week after go-live on 18 June, 36 applicants went through the flow. 20 completed the full screening, around 70%. Four could not be reached, and the rest ended without a final status.

The time saved in that one week came to 4.5 hours: 194 minutes of screening conversations that a staff member did not have to hold, plus 82 voicemails nobody had to leave. Since then the flow has run at roughly 20 to 23 conversations a day.

The response to it has been good in a way that is hard to put a number against. Exxtra has had no negative feedback from any of its regions. Two webinars for assistants who had been through an ELLA call drew positive reactions. What their team keeps coming back to is the speed of the reply.

Why this works outside staffing

Exxtra works in care, and its applicants have no other agency to shop around. The same approach works because the bottleneck is identical. A person makes contact outside office hours, a team can only answer inside them, and the value of the reply decays in the gap.

The screening still ends with a person. ELLA gathers what the assistant can offer and when, and the Exxtra team decides what happens next. What changed is when the deciding starts.

If your applicants are waiting until Monday

An application answered within minutes and one answered after the weekend are not the same application, whatever the form said.

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