Willo Expert Review, Pricing, Alternatives - 2023

Willo’s video interview solution is simple to set up and get started, unlike many other enterprise grade platforms in this space. It’s also priced affordably and flexibly so that you don’t have to go allin on a massive annual contract without understanding the tool. In fact, they have a free tier you can try out to make sure it’s as intuitive as we think it is. However, you should be aware that some of the bells and whistles you may find with a more mature product don’t exist in this tool.

Willo’s video interview platform is simple enough for smaller companies who want to do virtual interviews, but powerful enough for enterprise customers like Coinbase and high volume hirers who need to scale past thousands of interviews per month.  

From the talent acquisition perspective, you first login and create a company profile.  You can create multiple profiles here if you are managing multiple brands, or multiple company locations that demand their own account.  Willo allows you to brand the candidate experience to match your colors and logo.  

Next you can create interviews for specific types of roles through a fairly simple workflow that takes a few minutes: 

• Name your role
• Fill in pertinent details (salary, location, etc)
• Record an intro for candidates that outlines what they can expect in this interview, and how this fits into the overall candidate experience
• You can also leave a written description for candidates if you’d like

After the basics, your recruiting team will build out questions you have for candidates from Willo’s library of over 100 suggested questions, or whatever custom questions you want to include.  You can add up to 20 questions, although most video interviews will be much shorter (and should be, you want to keep the candidate experience in mind!).

There are other details admin or recruiters can set up such as defining how many retakes a candidate can do, and the maximum time a video response can be.  Then, your team will select a template to invite applicants to the video interview.  Communication can be via email or SMS, and will remind candidates that don’t take the interview after seeing the first notification.  

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You can also define the completion email that job seekers get after taking the assessment.  This can link to employer branding collateral, other assessments, or simply give them an idea on what to expect next.  You can also have candidates grab a time on one of your colleague’s calendars as a next step.  This is a small feature, but can be a massive time saver for your team —who likes to spend hours scheduling calls?

One of the key metrics that hiring teams need to look at for this tool, or analyzing any video interview solution, is the response rate from candidates.  A good response rate depends on the job you’re recruiting for, and at what stage in the process you are asking candidates to complete video interviews.  If it’s the bottom of the funnel, you should shoot for 100% completion.  Conversely, expect 20-30% if you invite all candidates as the first step in the recruiting process, especially for lower skilled roles.

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The main benefit of this solution is decreasing the amount of time spent on hiring.  Many recruiting teams are understaffed and managing loads of resumes is really hard, let alone scheduling next steps with candidates.

From the candidate's perspective, I get invited to an interview, get to understand what to expect from the message recorded from the hiring manager, get an opportunity to practice, and then answer the questions.  It’s very simple, and there is a live person standing by on chat if I have any questions (in addition to over 150 support articles).

We like Willo as it’s easy to set up for both recruiters and candidates, it’s priced affordably, and the company is value focused— they will send you a monthly KPI update that literally calculates the time your recruiting team has saved by using Willo.

Willo is great for teams that are hiring a lot either due to their growth rates of scale.  While it was originally founded to serve all types of companies, it really isn’t for smaller businesses that hire very periodically.  

The reason is simple.  The value from asynchronous video interviews comes from saving time.  If you can save 10 phone screens and instead watch 30 minutes of video interviews, you just saved hours of work.  If you hire hundreds or thousands of people per year, then the savings are really big.  But, if you are only hiring a few people per year, then it’s really difficult to get the ROI.

It’s also worth noting that some of the features you may find in other enterprise first solutions aren’t here including various admin levels, ability to send interview snippets, transcriptions, and more.  But, we find many companies don’t need nor want these features, and opt for a simpler tool like Willo.

Danone, NHS Scotland, 7 Eleven, Samsung, University of Pennsylvania

• Time saved calculator: Each month they’ll send the total amount of time saved for your company so you can understand the ROI from their solution.
• Device Transfer: Interviewees can scan a QR code on the screen if their laptop is having technical issues and they need to switch to a different device.  This aligns nicely with their candidate first ethos.
• Templates: Your team can create re-usable templates for candidate communication and interview processes.
• Resource links: Recruiters can link to resources from within their video interview questions.
• Video interview details: Your team can define how long answers can be, when an assessment needs to be completed, how many retakes, etc.
• Scheduling: Their tool will link with your calendar to offer synchronous interview scheduling as the next step in your hiring process.
• Bulk Invite: You can upload up to 1,000 candidates at a time, you can also invite candidates individually or add via the ATS.

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Willo has native ATS integrations with TeamTailor, Greenhouse, Workable, Lever, and Loxo.  Their most popular integration though is still via Zapier which allows you to connect with many different HR systems (you can check out if your recruiting system is part of the Zapier ecosystem on their website).

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We also want to point out that Willo has an Open API that allows other HR Tech companies and services to white label their solution and pay on a cost/interview basis.  ATS’s, job boards and a few staffing apps use their platform to deliver video interviews.

Willo has a free tier where you can interview up to 10 people per month.  This is great for small companies that want to try video interviewing, or larger companies that want to get a deeper feel for the product before moving to a paid tier.

Otherwise, the product is priced based on the number of users your team has.

• 0-5 users is $336/yr
• 5-20 users is $1,800/yr
• Their enterprise tier is $3,300/yr up to 1,000 employees
• If your company is over 1,000 employees, you’ll have to get a custom quote

We appreciate Willo has transparent pricing that is also accessible to SMBs.  In addition to the annual pricing quoted above, they do have month to month plans (annual plans get a 50% discount).

Willo’s video interview platform is best for companies that are hiring a lot either due to high growth, or scale.  And, their customer base reflects that with everything from airport managers to Coinbase as customers.  

Even though these examples are quite large businesses, many of their customers are small and medium-sized companies due to their pricing model which starts at $75/mo for up to 5 users.  In fact, most of their customers are 250 - 5,000 employee companies.

Implementing Willo for smaller companies takes about an hour from first signup to sending out your first interview links.  However, for larger companies this timeline gets extended as you will want to create more infrastructure around your interview and candidate communication templates.  

In addition, it will take time to train your colleagues on how to get the most leverage from this tool.  Willo helps setup and run these trainings, which aren’t all that arduous, but do need to get done to get the most from the tool.

Willo has a team of dedicated support people that cover 24 hours, seven days a week. This team supports both candidates and customers. However, less than 1% of interviews require technical support.

Willo was started by Euan Cameron who had been on both sides of the interview process and found it extremely stressful.  In addition, he was always hiring as part of his job at various startups.  

He wanted to find junior people with a lot of potential but found it hard to judge potential based on a resume alone.  Plus, many candidates don’t always have transport to get to the interview nor a suit to wear, so he found person interviews to be somewhat discriminatory.

Euan started asking candidates to record a few answers over video to bolster their resumes, and realized the power of seeing someone on video.  He also noticed that many of the existing platforms were way too expensive for smaller companies.  So, he started Willo.