At a glance

• Problem: Candidate assistants sign up in the evening and at the weekend. The Exxtra team could only call back on weekdays during office hours and by then they were much harder to reach, often taking several attempts.
• Solution: ELLA, Exxtra's AI assistant built on Ringtime, texts every new applicant and calls them within half an hour. She runs the full intake conversation and sends the team a report.
• Result: More than half of all completed screenings now happen outside office hours, work the team could never have covered on its own.

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Every assistant gets heard before they start

Exxtra finds assistants for people who need daily support, such as older people or people with a disability. It makes the arrangement official and pays the assistant within a legal framework. For people with nobody in their own network, Exxtra finds the help.

Bieke Boelaers has worked at Exxtra for more than three years. She is a regional manager and leads the team of regional managers, one per province.

"Our personal approach is central," says Bieke. "That is why we are organised by region, so that we can visit every person who asks for help at home."

The same applied to candidate assistants. Every applicant got a phone call from a colleague, who went through their details and explained how Exxtra works.

Applications arrive after the office closes

The calls took a growing share of the regional managers' week. The bigger problem was when the applications arrived.

"We called candidate assistants Monday to Friday, between half past eight and five," says Bieke. "Someone who signed up at the weekend or after hours only heard from us on the next working day. By then, we often could not reach them anymore, even after several attempts."

Those applicants were not always lost. But reaching them took extra time and anyone who did not answer and did not call back could drop out altogether.

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Bring AI into care without losing the personal call

"Of course we had our doubts at first," says Bieke. "Our personal approach matters a great deal to us and we want to keep it that way. But our candidate assistants respond very well. The conversations with ELLA usually go very smoothly. Some do not even notice it is AI."

A small group prefers a person and ELLA allows for that. "If someone says they really want to talk to a colleague, they get transferred and we take the call from there."

The setup itself went smoothly too. Exxtra's IT team was involved from the start and responded positively. "We first looked closely at what we wanted ELLA to say," says Bieke. "Then came a test phase, so we could test everything thoroughly before it went live."

What happens when someone signs up

1. A candidate assistant signs up on the Exxtra website.
2. Within 15 minutes, ELLA sends a text message to say she will call.
3. About 15 minutes later, ELLA calls and goes through the full registration in Dutch: personal details, experience in care and the tasks the assistant would like to take on.
4. The Exxtra team receives a report of the conversation and starts looking for a good match.

ELLA does the first screening. The decision stays with Exxtra.

"ELLA's screening is very informative," says Bieke. "But we still decide, based on the report and the conversation, whether an assistant is right to become active with us. If we have any doubt, we still contact them personally."

Start with one channel, add more later

Exxtra runs this deliberately lean: one channel, no integration, results by email. Their applicant platform is an in-house build with a replacement already planned for 2027, so wiring a deep integration into it would have been work with a short life.

Most Ringtime customers run more. They reach candidates on phone and WhatsApp together, in 22+ European languages, triggered the moment someone matches a vacancy in the recruitment system they already use. Bullhorn, RecruitNow, Connexys, Carerix and BrightStaffing are among them and the list keeps growing. Outcomes are written back into that system and qualified candidates are booked straight into a recruiter's calendar.

Check whether yours is on the list. Exxtra can add any of this later without redoing the first step.

More than half of screenings happen after hours

Calling this fast changed the success rate. "We see many more successful screenings, because ELLA reaches the assistant so soon after they sign up," says Bieke. "When we called a day later, we ended up on voicemail far more often."

The time of day tells the rest of the story.

"43% of completed screenings still happen during office hours," says Bieke. "But 25% happen after five, 23% at the weekend and another 9% before nine in the morning. So more than half of the successful screenings happen outside office hours. We could never have handled that ourselves."

The team also got its time back. "We have been running for about four months," says Bieke. "In the first three months, we won back 42 working hours."

That is more than a full working week of a regional manager's time, every quarter, on screening calls alone.

Hear every call back and correct what the agent missed

ELLA is still an AI assistant on a phone line. "If a candidate is in a noisy environment, ELLA is sensitive to that and can sometimes misinterpret something," says Bieke.

The team can check every case. "We can listen back to every conversation, the screening report flags it clearly and we can always adjust the data ourselves."

The conversations have improved since the start. "Every time we pass on feedback to Ringtime, something is done with it straight away. That goes quickly and smoothly."

Would she recommend it?

Bieke sees ELLA as a way to keep Exxtra's promise at scale.

"Because we are such a personal organisation, it matters to us that we have heard every assistant who signs up with Exxtra," she says. "So they know how we work and what they are signing up for. For organisations that want to cover that with the same personal approach, I would definitely recommend it to win back time."

And if ELLA stopped tomorrow? "Then we would do it ourselves again," says Bieke. "The team would not be very happy about that."

If your applicants wait until Monday

An applicant who hears back within half an hour is ready to talk. An applicant who hears back after the weekend often is not.

See how automated phone screening works or get screened by the agent yourself to hear the conversation from the applicant's side.

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Questions people ask about this

Can an AI agent call someone applying for a care job?

Yes. Exxtra has used one since June 2026 for every new assistant who signs up. The agent runs the full registration conversation in Dutch and sends the team a report. Exxtra has had no negative feedback from any of its regions and some applicants do not notice they are speaking to AI.

What happens if an applicant wants to speak to a person?

The agent transfers them. At Exxtra, an applicant who says they want a colleague is handed to the Exxtra team, who take the call from there. It is a small share of applicants.

How quickly does an applicant get called?

At Exxtra, a text message goes out within 15 minutes of someone signing up and the call follows about 15 minutes later. That holds in the evening and at the weekend, when more than half of all completed screenings now happen.

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