The Use Case Podcast: Storytelling about Willo with Euan Cameron & Andrew Wood

William  00:00

This is William Tincup and you’re listening to the Use Case Podcast. Today, we have Euan, and Andrew on from Willo. And we’re going to be talking about their business. So why don’t we do this, why don’t we do introductions? Euan, why don’t you introduce yourself. Andrew, and then you introduce yourself? And then Andrew, won’t you introduce Willo to the audience? 

 

Euan  00:49

Sure.Thanks, William. It’s great to be here. First of all, thanks for having us on the show. My, my background is really in digital marketing, and 15 years digital marketing. So I am based in Scotland, and in a city called Glasgow, you may or may not have heard of it. It’s a fairly small city, in comparison to the cities in the US. But it’s a nice place. My background, obviously, in digital marketing, and over the over the past 15 years, lots of hiring, obviously, for teams, as I’ve been growing my teams. And over the course of all those all those hires, I learned that things weren’t as good as it could be and wanted to make the hiring process better for both the recruiter like me hiring and also for the candidates that were getting hired. And that’s what led me to build Willo, and started building Willo back in 2018. With with Andrew or Woody, as we call him. And yeah, that’s that’s kind of it’s fairly, fairly short, kind of injured the robot, but yeah, glad to be here. And thanks for having us.

 

William  01:58

Absolutely. Andrew. Woody.

 

Woody  02:03

Yeah, so I’ll try and be as enthusiastic as possible and say how awesome it is, obviously, I’m British. So apologies. I can’t be quite as amped up as probably nice to be guests. But so I’m Woody, I have essentially, work with Euan and Euan’s, the clever guy, I’m basically the kind of sales guy if you like. And my background is for 11 or so years, I worked for a small company called Pareto, which was actually the UK’s leading early careers organization for sales graduates. And they would get about 30,000 applicants per month that they’d have to process which is unbelievably mind blowing. And part of Randstad that people in the US have typically heard of, and yeah, essentially, that’s me. So I have worked for the last 11 years helping people find talent, and latterly working really heavily with organizations to develop kind of succession planning, career pathways and training and that kind of stuff. And yeah, so that that’s me in a nutshell, in terms of Willo. We are very simply a one way video interview platform. And what we try to do with our business is keep everything as frictionless and as simple as possible. So if you’re looking for a very clean candidate user and hiring manager experience, that’s exactly what we’re trying to provide as a business and make that available to everyone from a one man band, right the way up to, you know, global organizations like du San and Samsung, for example.

 

William  03:50

So, so till we get our lingo down one way, I guess, some people call it synchronous and asynchronous. One way describe that for the audience, what is that? What is it? What does it typically mean for the employer?

 

Woody  04:07

Yes, so it is the technical name is definitely asynchronous, which basically means you record your answer without somebody watching you live and asking you a question straight off the back of it as the easiest way to describe it, I think.

 

William  04:22

And do candidates get practice tries? Do they get to – or guidance around kind of how to do a video – if I think thankfully, over there, I guess some of the upside or the silver linings of COVID is that people are more familiar with video interviewing now more than ever, which is good. But there’s still probably some anxiety around for candidates around you know, just kind of nailing and doing a really good job in their – in their presentation or their interview. So take us into that. How do you how do you kind of help candidates navigate that anxiety?

 

Woody  05:00

Yeah, it’s really interesting. And it is obviously, something that comes up in, you know, 99% of our demos is how do – how the candidates actually feel about one way video. And in one way, we have been helped out by the pandemic, now that everybody feels a bit more comfortable. But if if you actually look at the comments that we get, so we ask every candidate that goes through our process to give us a rating, and 89% of people rate us as eight or above out of 10, and an NPS score for candidates around 68, which considering we’re putting them under pressure, for roles is, is pretty exceptional. But the main bit of the main comment that we get is, oh, I felt really nervous about this, when I got sent the link, I felt really nervous. But then I went on and saw how simple it was only had to click four buttons. And that put me at ease. And there’s so many things that are really important about our processes, things like not having to download an app and not having to put in any details before you do your interview. And exactly right, having an opportunity to make sure your tech is working in practice, in our platform, as well. And this is something that as a TA professional, you really need to think about, you have the option to set the number of kind of retakes that somebody gets, you can change the amount of time. And whilst it’s important to put somebody under pressure, it’s also important to be sympathetic to the fact that it is a relatively new form of interviewing. And you want to you know, our job as, as talent professionals is to get the best out of candidates not to, you know, make them squirm to the point where they fail. And with that in mind, you know, you want to try and set up your platform and you have it to make it comfortable.

 

William  06:57

So you and let me ask you a question on the collaboration side, on the back end for the employers, you’ve got sourcers and recruiters and hiring managers, they’re all trying to find the talent. And then obviously, you get links out to people that you want to interview. How do you how do you, you know, if you had a magic wand, how do you want them to collaborate when they are viewing those candidate videos?

 

Euan  07:22

Yeah, so this is an interesting one, I was in the fortunate position that I went, I was designing Willo was designing Willo for myself. So I was I was basically customer number one. So I was thinking about how I would want to do it in my business as a hiring manager. And that was that was really, our, our target user was a hiring manager. So hiring manager, someone who’s busy, has a ton of other things on the go, but needs to hire the best people for their team. And they need to do all that very quickly. So at the other end of things we we kind of, we spent literally two years, and it kind of seems like forever going on. But we spent two years actually interviewing and surveying both hiring managers and candidates to figure this process out. And what we wanted to do was create a frictionless process for talent acquisition, hiring managers, you know, heads of HR, where they didn’t feel like they actually had to do anything, it didn’t feel like they had to go into you know, learn another system, and add more more things to their already busy days that they already have. So what we what we did was actually just design the system based on other amazing systems already out there. So we looked at things like Trello. And we literally know the Kanban boards that Trello has, and then we look to inboxes and how Gmail works and how, you know, it lists all of your emails in an order and how it’s really easy to find things and, and go through that that process. So we we kind of took what was already working well in the marketplace and likened Willo to those systems, rather than just saying what we’re going to do and starting with a blank canvas, because people are already familiar with lots of amazing systems and tools that are out there. So there’s no point in breaking up familiarity. And so, like I said, we did a lot of research and in the background, before we did, we actually we launched Willo to the world. And all of that research has led us to the solution that we have today. And the solution that we have today is really, really simple. You know, for for a hiring manager, they’re going to go in and they’re going to review the candidates in a Kanban board style, which they’re used to after using other tools. They can then rate those candidates with a star rating. And then they can share those candidate profiles and candidate videos with anyone inside your organization or clients outside of their organization. And there’s no logins, there’s no passwords, there’s no complicated accounts that they need to set up to do that. Because this was one of the things that we found, again, from researching awardees out there with other platforms in particular is that People don’t like to have to add people to accounts because then you have to set the password, you normally forget the password, all that kind of stuff. So we just tried to really remove a lot of correction. So if you were to summarize Willo fields, from a business or a user perspective or recruiter perspective, it’s, it’s not adding anything to your existing and probably quite busy, complicated workload, Willo just slots into whatever your workflow looks like. And hopefully, well, we see this from our feedback, but we also made it this way, it doesn’t add any additional kind of cognitive load to someone, it is clicking video with him to do. And then they get on with their day and really go about your the tool without having to do a huge amount

 

William  10:45

I love that. Alright, I’m gonna get back to workflow with you in just a second, Woody, I want to go into demos for just a second. And a couple things that I’d like to kind of peel out of this part of the discussion. One is, is when you’re demoing Willo to folks, what’s the, you know, the sizzle or the aha moment or something that they stick on? And go “I love that.” What’s that thing for Willo?

 

Woody  11:15

So it’s a great question. And it’s such a, it’s such a boring answer. But it’s – the reality is, you walk them through the candidate process, and everybody just goes, I love how simple it is. Right? And it’s, you know, it really does sound dull, but —

 

William  11:37

No. Simple is difficult. Turns out. 

 

Woody  11:40

– the hardest thing to do. And you kind of you know, I, I had a chat with my sales guy. And I was like, man, I think we’re saying simple too much. I think we’re making this look too simple. 

 

William  11:53

No, that’s elegant.

 

Woody  11:56

Indeed. So So, you know, it’s that it’s that candidate experience, we always start with the candidate experience, because again, from – from experience as a recruiter, you’re nothing without candidates, you’re not, you might not exist, right. So if their process isn’t awesome, and engaging, and easy to use, they’re not going to they’re not going to apply. So you’re going to miss out on a huge pool of talent. I’d much rather make it easier for a larger number of people to apply than really difficult, really hard and maybe get the top 1% of video interviews, if that makes sense.

 

William  12:35

Totally makes sense. And you know, what’s funny? Is the younger the generation, the last apt they are to go through difficulty with technology. 

 

Woody  12:43

Oh, yeah. Patience.

 

William  12:46

Yeah, they’ll x out of it. It’s like yeahh. And there’s judgment as well. You know, it’s like, okay, yeah, these people obviously don’t know what they’re doing. “Delete.”

 

Woody  12:56

I had a chat, a really interesting chat with it on a demo of just before this call. And we were saying, basically, about how, you know, a candidate applies for a job. And it’s, it was kind of an entry level position, right, like an intern. And they’re probably applying for like, 500 roles. A day, at least. Yeah. And the funny thing is, what companies don’t think about is, or maybe they do, but what they should be worried about is that candidate, you know, when you do a telephone interview, they pick up the phone and they go, I’m sorry, what was the job that I applied for? Oh, right. Okay. And then if enabled, and if you don’t spend 10 minutes getting to know that person, that candidate then hangs up and gives you a bad review, despite the fact that they answered going, Who are you again?

 

William  13:49

That’s right. No. Yeah. Yeah, no, they’re not gonna blame themselves. It’s part of humanity. Right. They’re gonna blame the technology, and blame you. And so, you know, it’s, it’s – Yeah, it’s, it’s interesting. I think that sticking on the simple part. The – the part that I love about things being simple for candidates is that – is there’s so many things in our lives that are difficult and complex. So when you read something that simple, it’s kind of an oasis. They kind of can go in there do their bit. And, and it’s theirs. Again, I think he used the word, or maybe it was even frictionless. Yeah, making making that easy for people. I think, I think you keep using the word simple. Because there’s a lot of things in our in our local technology world that aren’t. I want to continue down with you with. Okay, so if I – if you had a magic wand, and it was questions that people asked during demos, so you’re gonna you’re talking to practitioners, you’ve been on the other side of the dev so you know, kind of how they think. Stop, start continue is a kind of a nice framework that I like to use, what would you, you know, love for people to start asking you, when you do the demo, you’d love for the conversation and questions line of questions to be more like this, you’d like to stop some of these types of questions. Because they’re just, they go nowhere, they’re just not value added. And things that you’d love to add to that to their arsenal of questions, because what we’re trying to do with this podcast is to educate practitioners around the buy process. So magic wand. And, you know, the next time you would actually show somebody Willo, what would you like that experience to be?

 

Woody  15:43

Wow, that is a, unfortunately, as a reflector, a deep question. I would love to answer quickly. And I think that the questions that you get asked that are kind of pointless are like, you know, it happens, doesn’t it? When you’re demoing a product? They go, Well, what happens if you click that button? And you’re like, Okay, you know, should we move away from the minutia? Exactly, of, of what happens if we click a specific button or, or whatever? And the best conversations I have are things like, I love the simple user face. But how would you recommend that we get the most diverse pool of candidates? Yeah, and the reality is the number of demos that I’m doing, and the number of companies that we work with, you know, 130 countries already, we’ve got pretty good insights into companies that get, you know, a good number of candidates through the process, a diverse pool of candidates, you know, an inclusive pool. I think we ran the stats. Last month, you and under the gender of individuals, and it was like 51%, female 49% male, which was really interesting. So we’re looking at that a little bit more, and they’re the questions you want to answer is not, you know, what are the issues with pressing a button or the functionality? Or where could it go wrong or whatever. Because there isn’t really that far it can go wrong, it’s how do we use this tool to enhance the candidate experience and therefore get the best talent for our company? So yeah, they’re the kind of questions I’d love to see more of.

 

William  17:25

Also, I’ll add, just just because I think it’s important. I prefer when purse practitioners don’t talk about price, or ask about price, until it’s really needed. I mean, you’re gonna get around the price, you’re not gonna buy something, you’re not gonna buy a car, you know, at one point, you’re going to get around to the price of the car, but let’s get into the car and see if the car works for you, you know, let’s see if, you know, let’s see if all the features of the car kind of makes sense, etc, as an intuitive all that other stuff. And you’re eventually going to get the price. But one of the things I’m always advocating for practitioners is don’t rush to talk about money.

 

Woody  18:08

Oh, yeah, I mean, as a salesperson, the last thing I ever want to speak about is price. Right? But I was gonna get to it. 

 

William  18:16

You’re gonna get to it. Yeah.

 

Woody  18:17

Yeah. Well, I actually had a meeting with a sales manager once and the guy opposite kept going, what’s the price? What’s the price is like 10 minutes into this meeting. And the manager go picks up this pen. And he goes, imagine this pen is price, right? I know it’s there. And I’m gonna put it down here on the table. And you’re gonna know that we’re gonna come back to this pencil or pen or whatever. Let’s just pretend right now. We know it’s there. And we’re coming to it later. And we just run through a little bit more detail before I come back to the pen. Okay, cool. Yeah, makes sense. Yeah, yeah,

 

William  18:56

We’re gonna get to it. It’s inevitable. Yeah, there’s a proposal, there’s a contract, there’s a Yeah, eventually, we’re gonna get there. We don’t need to get there on the first in the first conversation and happens in the States, that practitioner, especially HR, and TA, they get they start with price very, very, very soon in the process. And it’s just like, just wait and get there. Just make sure that it works and fits and do all that other stuff. And then work out price.

 

Woody  19:28

And Euan’s probably got a good perspective on this as well. But one of the things that we’ve tried to do differently is obviously have a freemium offer. And one of the best ways to manage expectations versus reality. And you see people moving from platform to platform going are well, in my two week trial, I didn’t quite see enough of the product. And, you know, it wasn’t what the sales guy sold to me and dysfunction was on the roadmap and where’s it gone and all that kind of stuff and the best way to manage somebody’s expectations is going to, you know, have it free forever. And then if you run out of credits, that’s a good thing, right? Because it’s working for you. So I don’t know, if you and you’d add anything else to the freemium chat? No,

 

Euan  20:11

I think what I was gonna add, I think it would be one of the things that I think it’s important that people ask more of is how best to use Willo. In their existing process. I think that because that’s an interesting one that comes up quite a lot. And it feeds back to what we offer for free William as well. We have this free version of the platform, because a lot of people don’t know how it’s going to fit into their process they’ve never used to interviewing before. It’s a completely new concept. They’re trying to shoehorn in sometimes to their process, who I would rather they do is actually ask us, because like when he says, we have enough experience now to know how video interviewing as a tool fits into business processes. Right? Right. So people should be asking us? And that’d be a really valuable question because we can then help them build a process and get

 

William  21:02

You’re, scratching on something that’s really interesting for me, because it’s leveraging vendor knowledge. And practitioners, again, this is something that that we don’t do a good enough job of, of leveraging the vendor vendor has 50,000 clients all over the world, you know, they probably know a thing or two about workflow to your point, or maybe even integrations, which is something I was gonna ask you about you and anyhow, is, you know, asking questions like that, after you see it the understanding a bit, then it’s like, okay, no, where does this Where do – Where do your clients put this? How do they communicate with candidates about this? You know, again, workflow and process, then things like that, those are great questions in a bias in the buy cycle.

 

Woody  21:49

And willing, if they don’t know the answer, run to the hills.

 

William  21:53

Yeah. That’s 100%. Yeah, you’re if the vendor can’t, if the vendor can’t guide you based on that means that either they’re not paying attention to their clients, or they don’t have clients could be a combination. You and we just, we just nibbled on integrations, and, and and workflow. So this is obviously, and they can place it different places in workflow and interact with workflow differently. But you’re also you want these videos, ultimately to end up somewhere in there process might be an ATS might be something else. What does that look like for? For Willo?

 

Euan  22:34

That’s a great question. So we again, when we did our research over over over two years, we learned, as you’ll know, everyone listening will notice that there’s a lot of different ways to manage your candidates out there. A lot of people use spreadsheets, a lot of people use CRM, a lot of people use ATS, and then there’s a whole bunch of stuff in between. So it’s a really complicated, you know, place out there. And one of the things that we’ve done from the very start is Sage people. Willo can integrate with whatever solution you want. So if you are the person that uses a spreadsheet, and you have all your candidates in a spreadsheet, that’s fine, we’re not going to change that we don’t want to break that process, because that might work for you. So what we say is actually integrate Willo into your spreadsheet, and that’s perfectly fine. And you can do that really quickly and easily with Zapier, for example. So we have a zap here integration, you’re going to drag and drop Willo into your Zapier flow, and it will link in with your spreadsheet. And you can do that with Google sheets or Microsoft Excel. Super simple. And then the other end of the spectrum. You’ve got people using ATSs, you got ATSs like greenhouse and workable, which again, we integrate with. So you can push your candidate videos into that spreadsheet, you can push your candidate videos into that ATS, we’re not going to come along and tell you how to do that whole candidate management and process workflow thing. Obviously, we will if you want us to. And as you said, quite rightly, we have enough candidates and sorry, enough customers out there that we know a thing or two about what works. And we’re more than happy to share what does work because, you know, if a company is successful, we’re successful. So we want to make sure that we’re sharing that knowledge and success. But like I said, as well, we’re not going to come along and say you’re doing this wrong, you need to change it. The platform is flexible and agile enough so you can kind of stick it in any part of the process that you want. And even just in the positioning of video interviewing, video interviewing has a lot of different places for video interviewing right at the start, and they’ll put all of their candidates through video interviewing. And it will just be a simple Introduce yourself interview. Other people then will use video interviewing, you know, after they’ve screened the candidate, and they’ll use it to get to know our candidate better to then present that candidate to a hiring manager or to a client and then other people will use it even as a second round interview. Before actually hiring, so there’s lots of different places you can use it right at the very start and light touch or right away at the very end, where it’s really in depth and detailed. And you’re really drilling into the skills and competencies of that person for this specific role. But like I said, we’re, we’re happy to share that knowledge. And this is goes back to the question around the demos, people should be asking these, you know, in these demos, for these answers, we already know where it fits well, and when we can help make the best process possible.

 

William  25:30

So perfect. And I’ve seen it used in the ways that you’ve described in some of the companies some of his job by job, so they might have one job, or they put it away out in the funnel, if we use that analogy, they put it away on the front of the funnel. And with the very next position, it’s a different position, they put it way further down into the funnel, and they do something different with it. So you can use it in a lot of different ways, which is, again, that flexibility, you’re thinking about the candidates thinking about what you want to get out of, and what their experience as well. What do you let me assure a question on pricing. And I want to two kinds of questions. One is, and we’d love to get down to the specifics of it, but it’s more of a, you know, how you go about pricing, like your pricing philosophy. And then the second part of that is the conversion from freemium to paid, or to enterprise or whatever, whatever that is, what does that look like?

 

Woody  26:32

Yeah, I mean, freemium marketing funnels, definitely Euan’s bag. So I’ll hand that over to him in a second. But from a pricing model perspective. Wow. I mean, I know that you’re, you’re involved in the market, as such, William, in terms of one way video, interviewing and the the number of models that people use, it’s mind boggling. As a buyer. Yeah. Honestly, it is, how do you compare the two products that look the same with products that with pricing, you know, metrics that are completely different. So again, we try and keep it relatively simple, around number of responses, right? Level of support, and then everything else is kind of unlimited. So –

 

William  27:24

I think that’s the best, I think that’s the best way – that way your, your interest is aligned with theirs, you want em to use it, you want them to put it in front of candidates. And so, you know, again, I’ve seen all of the different pricing models since 2008. And, and again, they’ve they have almost every one of them to a tee has been different. And but I do I love, I love the unlimited part of that. Just to be able to say, you know what, we’re not going to get that if you want to, if you want to, if you want 10,000 people, I mean, it’s a lot of people to do interviews. But if you want that, that’s fine. Maybe Maybe not advisable. But if that’s something you want, that’s fine, you don’t have to you’re not staring at the clock, you’re not staring at it worrying about is this driving up cost.

 

Woody  28:11

A lot of minutes to watch, there.

 

William  28:13

It is a lot of minutes to watch. Actually, you know, something we don’t talk about that often. And probably we should is, you know, you’re you’re wanting to create a great candidate experience. But you’re also on the back end for recruiters and hiring managers, you’ve got to consume those minutes. Yep. So, you know, like, where and everywhere and network for where in that process? You know, we need to think we need to be more conscientious about that. So those are, again, great questions to ask the buyer process. Like when we think of this, we’ve got to also think of consumption on our side. And what we’re going to do and how we’re going to collaborate and take notes, you know, that type of stuff.

 

Woody  28:50

And, you know, again, that comes back to the consulting piece of don’t just add video, if you’re adding video, what are you taking away? So.

 

William  29:02

Yeah, there’s only a limited amount of time. So and, and Euan the freemium to the conversion model, what does that look like for you?

 

Euan  29:12

Yeah, so I guess I’ll rewind back to why we have a freemium model. And one of the one of the visions for us is that we want as many people as possible as many businesses as possible to benefit from video interviewing, because we obviously believe very strongly that it’s the best way to be to be identifying and finding candidates. And the only way that we could really see of doing that was making it easy to access and easy to use. For you know, people that never heard of the concept before like completely new to it, they can just click into the platform and start using it. And that’s that’s the that’s the reason for the model. I literally wanted to, to get as many people using platform and understanding the benefits of video interviewing as possible. And as you all know, as everyone As everyone knows, if people like using your product, they will pay for it. It’s not. It’s not rocket science, once you get people liking and loving your product, they will pay for it. And that’s, that’s, that’s been our model since day 1, William, is just give the customer exactly what they want. And, you know, over service and over deliver on customer support on things like what do you mentioned about educating them and consulting them? Give them everything you want. And, you know, if we do a good, we will do good as a business, as they say.

 

William  30:32

And it’s funny I was I advised a startup in Israel. It’s a kind of a skills, assessment play, and they do scenarios. So right. And one of the things we talked about last night was try before you buy, why wouldn’t you let a candidate try the job – and you know, these are certain jobs, right? Not all jobs. But why wouldn’t you let the candidate try before they buy? Why wouldn’t you try the candidate before, you buy, so, both sides, so I love – one of my friends here in Dallas is actually an expert in the freemium model. He’s gone around the world, does speeches, builds communities, does all that stuff. And so he’s very, very, very good about understanding kind of what the drivers are. So if you ever want to talk to somebody about that, like, what’s going on in Premium. His name’s Lincoln Murphy, and just a wonderful, wonderful guy – lives lives, lives right around the corner from me. Four questions left, and two for Euan and two for Woody, so we’ll – we’ll start with with Euan. First question is how do you how do you track the roadmap in terms of like new features that you want to add things that you’re hearing from clients or things that you’re hearing from candidates, etc? How do you – How are you? You know, how are you thinking about new features to add for – for Willo?

 

Euan  32:01

Sure, I haven’t I have a good answer for this. And I actually shared on LinkedIn a couple of weeks ago, I’ll send you the link after that. So you can share it with your network, William, but our our roadmap is, is really divided up into two very simple categories of friction or delight. Does the feature remove friction or add delight, it can do both. But it needs to do one or the other. And it falls into one of those categories. And then we basically each month, we’ll review that roadmap and figure out, you know, if it’s adding delay, how many of those features do we need? And then at the same time, how do we balance that with removing friction? We’re making things faster for the existing users are having friction. And that’s really the very simple high level roadmap recipe that I’ve kind of derived over, over a couple of years of doing different products, right? It’s just to keep it again, goes back to being simple, right? It could be really complicated. And it could have lots of fancy ways of categorizing and labeling which I’ve done in the past. And it’s not a It’s not like I haven’t tried all those things, but it just ends up too much to manage, right, you got to manage your roadmap, we’ve also got to do other things. So just trying to get the roadmap simple. So whenever somebody requests a feature, it falls into one of those two categories. And then depending on on our workload and our work stack for each month, we will tend to fill it to run a nice combination of friction and delight features. I love that we do two releases a month, William, so our users can look forward to a feature and a feature release the first week of the month, and then typically the serve second or last week of the month, when we stick to that every month. And it just means that we’re rewarding is thanking our users, obviously, for being with us. But we’re also enticing lots of new users to join us with our new, new delightful features.

 

William  34:04

I love that. One of the things I’ve talked to product owners about in the past, is as you add a feature, you take away something that’s not being used – to kind of always kind of keeping, you know, so you don’t end up with feature bloat. You you kind of balance that out, which I think you probably already natively already do that.

 

Euan  34:24

That kind of happens. Yeah. Is good fun. I mean, that’s, that’s always a challenge. Right? Right, is there’s always going to be a percentage of users as well, that use the feature that you might remove. How do you balance that and then you’ve got a tech that holding on to that feature as well.

 

Woody  34:44

The best example of that when when we were developing the product we were like, you know, I’d be amazing if we had this like question generator that did competency based questions. And people would use it and then they just delete the questions. Okay, so people really like the idea of the function, but the actual function itself, nobody uses it. 

 

William  35:09

No, that’s because most companies aren’t, aren’t aren’t operated with competency models. So…no one wants to talk about that, by the way, 

 

Euan  35:17

And also in the user, the user also always knows best. The best questions in the world, but they might not be right for that person. 

 

William  35:30

100% – that is 100%. Because they’ve got the questions, and they think that their questions are gonna be better than the questions that everyone else uses. Euan and let’s, let’s stick with you for just this. This is a simple one. I think, with video interviews today are do you see them being used or being being done? Created via mobile, tablet? desktop? Like where are candidates? Currently? What what are they using to create their videos?

 

Euan  36:00

And that’s a really good question. And it depends on where they are in the world. And so Asia, for example, APAC region is all about mobile, and you’re looking at like 80% of candidates use mobile. Europe, US, it’s more like 50% of candidates are using mobile, and the other 50 are using laptops, desktop browsers, right. That would be your split. Interesting, but not particularly surprising. It kind of just aligned with general way of usage.

 

William  36:35

Yeah, and it’s – in South America, they didn’t build as much of the landlines. So they built but they built a tremendous amount of infrastructure on wireless. Yeah, so not shocking, not shocking, that, you know, things are gonna be that way there. Okay, so that makes sense to me. What do you- two things – one is the metric that you and you and both kind of look at to make sure that the business is healthy? What’s that thing that y’all care about? Is it the number of interviews that go through the system? Like, what’s the thing that you care the most about?

 

Woody  37:12

It’s probably different between the two of us as a salesman. How health of the business is number of interviews for a number of happy candidates coming through to our happy clients basically. And then, one of one of the metrics that that I keep an eye on is the number of referrals that we’re getting on call and how people heard of us. And one of the greatest things about a freemium model is you can have, you can have 10 companies use it for free fill a role, the one role that they have in a yearly basis. And then all 10 of them know, somebody in a massive corporate recommend that they look at Willo. And lo and behold, those 10 free users have just turned into an enterprise client. So that’s, that’s the kind of stuff that’s really important to me, we obviously have a huge deck.

 

William  38:10

Oh, yeah, of course, It’s, but you also mentioned very around ratings and NPS, which, obviously you’re keeping an eye on those who are your top line revenue, but I think it for me, as I look at the business, it’s the number of happy candidates. I mean, you know, you’ve used word does humans use the word delight? You know, you want people to go through this process and have a good experience whether or not they get hired or not, you can’t control that that’s out of your purview. But you can control whether or not they have a great experience. And so I can see that. Last out is before we end the show is what else should the audience know about Willo and both y’all can tackle this if you’d like but we’ll start with Woody.

 

Woody  38:57

What else…there’s so much I don’t know where to begin…

 

William  39:01

Alphabetical?

 

Woody  39:04

Well, it’s awesome. Brilliant. What else should they know about Willo I think the other thing that that really sets us apart and it’s not really anything that we haven’t said already but we really listen to our partners. So you know, we’re at a phase where we launched the product in January 2020. And if you if you ask any of our paying customers especially you know the the kind of upper end of our client base, they’ve all requested features and they’ve all gone into the Remove friction and add delight so we really listen to to our customers that obviously we’re listening to our candidates and that you know, we’re a candidate first company is what we want ourselves because we spend so much time making that amazing. But we also really take into account exactly what our customers want and and act on it in a very agile manner. That’s the only thing i would i would add about us. Really?

 

William  40:13

Okay. Euan, you have your parting remarks?

 

Euan  40:17

I do. Yeah, I think, from my perspective, I always like to talk about the secret sauce of Willo, and what the secret sauce of Willo really is. And if you if you want to, if you want to answer that question, the secret sauce is that it works on any device, and it works seamlessly in any device. And that’s much harder, and less sexy, then then it should be. It’s actually really difficult to do. But Willo works on on any mobile phone, it works on any browser. It also works well on those devices. We do a ton of testing across, you know, different, you know, even like really niche mobile phones in China and things that don’t even make it to the west. We use those as test devices and things as well. So that’s probably the only thing I would add, other than what we’ve already spoken about is that there’s there’s a lot of like, really boring stuff going on behind the scenes, which actually makes what we do work really well.

 

Woody  41:16

Right, you can actually put a stat on that as well, only not it’s like 0.5% of candidates that go through our process need any technical assistance whatsoever? So yeah.

 

William  41:33

Well, they – No, no, I was just thinking that, again, the audience is always changing. It’s one of the consumer marketing axioms of the very moment that you understand your audiences, the very moment that they change. Right, and technology is – good god, right? So if you’re not always testing those things, at one point, you you run the risk of being obsolete. Yeah. So so it’s it’s not only I mean, it’s, it’s, you know, people that don’t do it, do it at their own peril.

 

Euan  42:02

Yeah, we’ve seen that as well firsthand, from, from demos, you know, we’re people are using other other platforms. And those platforms are relying on technology like flash, believe it or not, it doesn’t even matter. I just got a call last year from a platform or somebody was using a platform, they still use flash and their candidates, were not going to be able to do it anymore. So that kind of stuff is really interesting. Like that is is always a work in progress as well. Yeah. And it’s a really, it’s becoming harder to do, because there is more and more devices coming out and more more operating systems and browsers is one of the things that nobody really talks about, because like I said, it’s really unsexy. But it is an important consideration when you’re looking at these kind of tools.

 

William  42:46

Again, you get back to that candidate experience, the candidate has to have a great experience, if they’re on some, you know, I just bought a brand new Samsung, if they’re on some brand new phone that we haven’t optimized for, they’re not going to have a great experience. And that’s all they’ll know. They won’t know that – they won’t know the why they won’t know the plumbing, they won’t know the the non-sexy stuff they won’t know or care about it.

 

Woody  43:10

They know that it works on every phone before that one.

 

William  43:13

That’s right. That’s exactly right. And like, like take Chrome or Safari or any of those types of things. You know, they they won’t care that you’ve optimized for every Chrome browser up into the one right before it will do really. Yeah, that’s all they care about is their experience. And you know what, that’s fair. That’s all they should care about. It’s our job to care more about those other things. And you’re right, some companies do do a really good job of caring and, and doing the hard work behind the scenes again, you know, and some don’t, and they do that at their own peril. Guys, this has been fantastic. Thank you so much for your time, and for coming on the Use Case Podcast and explaining Willo to us.

 

Woody  43:59

Thanks, it’s been awesome.

 

William  44:02

Alrighty, until next time, and thanks for everyone that listens to the Use Case Podcast. We’ll see you soon.