Highlights:
- Remote Talent LATAM has grown steadily since its founding in 2017, but experienced a surge from 2020-2022.
- The company had significant inbound interest from candidates and companies alike, but it needed a better interview tool to scale sustainably.
- Leveraging Willo, Remote Talent LATAM was able to increase revenue 300% without needing additional headcount.
Remote Talent LATAM needed a scalable interview solution
Angel Salinas, founder of Remote Talent LATAM (RTL), founded the company in 2017 after leaving an agency. He wanted to help people throughout Latin America find great remote jobs at a time when remote work was difficult to find.
“We were one of the first remote recruiting agencies in Latin America,” said Angel. “In 2017, very few people were doing remote work, but the companies that were needed talent so they came to us.”
RTL continued to grow from 2017 to 2020, then the COVID-19 pandemic exploded demand for RTL’s services and remote work in general.
While excited about the growth, Angel needed to find a way to scale sustainably. He primarily helped companies fill English-language sales roles, meaning that he needed to assess candidates for both English fluency and outgoingness, a character trait his clients felt was critical for success in a sales job. However, he noticed scheduling interviews became difficult and incredibly time consuming.
“You can often tell within a couple minutes if a candidate has solid English skills or is outgoing,” said Angel. “Scheduling dozens of interviews back to back just to learn that in two minutes per person was a huge waste of our time and theirs.”
With significantly more candidates to interview and clients to serve, Angel needed a better solution that would help him quickly screen out bad-fit candidates without forcing those individuals to rearrange their days to book an interview.
He ultimately tried Willo because he liked that it offered a browser-based dashboard for him (no apps to download) and a purpose-built interface for candidates (versus manually recording a Zoom and uploading it to a Google Drive).
In the end, Willo proved to be the perfect interview solution.
Educating candidates and scaling up
After implementing Willo, Angel noticed an instant win—and a challenge.
The RTL team loved Willo because it provided a quick and easy dashboard for them to create interview questions, automate reminders, integrate with their ATS platform, and scale up their efforts.
Candidates initially pushed back, expressing concern that they would not be taken seriously via recorded video. But Angel realized this was an education issue more than a candidate experience problem. He made sure to leverage Willo’s automated reminder features to help educate candidates on how to present themselves in video and share how the RTL team would be assessing them.
Once candidates learned how the platform really worked, the benefits became obvious. Now, candidates say they love the flexibility that Willo offers them since many have jobs and can’t rearrange their days for multiple first-round interviews.
Angel also noticed that a lot of candidates submit interviews on weekends. Since the RTL team doesn’t work weekends, this would have been a huge missed opportunity for RTL and candidates alike without a video interview platform.
With Willo powering first-round screens, Angel and the team could focus on client growth. The company ultimately grew revenue by 300% from 2020 to 2021 without having to scale up the team at all. Looking back at their old process, Angel said the uptick in candidates would have required two more full-time staff members if they hadn’t used Willo.
“With Willo, we knew we could focus on growth, candidate experience, and client satisfaction without tons of additional cost,” said Angel.
Up next: Leveraging video throughout the interview process
After a successful Willo implementation for first-round screens, Angel is expanding how the company uses the platform.
First, he’s leveraging Willo’s new audio-only feature for first-round interviews. He found candidates like audio even better than video, since Angel can still assess outgoingness and English proficiency but candidates gain even more flexibility and don’t have to worry about how they look or filming inside their homes.
Second, he’s using Willo later in the process. After a first-round screen, candidates have a live interview with an RTL team member. If selected as a finalist for a job listing, candidates use Willo to record an introduction video that will be sent to the company. Hiring managers at that company use the videos to select which top candidates they want to interview, then RTL makes the introduction. This whole process saves candidates a lot of time and also gives RTL (and its clients) a better experience.
“Willo is so easy to use, candidates like it, and it works,” said Angel. “We’ve tripled business since 2020 and are able to grow without needing to hire new recruiters.”
