Packaly is building a sustainable, environmentally-friendly delivery marketplace in Amsterdam and other cities throughout Europe. A key part of their strategy is hiring couriers who deliver items on bicycles to customers, but the company faced a huge time and resources bottleneck when it came to interviewing and hiring couriers.
Using Willo, the team was able to save 60 hours of employees time per week while delivering a higher-quality candidate experience. Packaly’s Head of Growth Justin Plagis explained how he discovered Willo, why he loves working with the Willo team, and his favourite part of the Willo platform.
The challenge of scaling up recruiting efforts
As Packaly grew, it needed to scale up courier (Packaly calls them “Riders”) recruiting efforts by 3x to meet increasing business demand. However, that opened up significant problems for both the in-house recruiting team and the Rider candidates themselves.
Challenges for recruiters
Packaly’s team wanted to provide a high-quality candidate experience. This often meant booking individual interviews with every person who applied, even though the team typically asked the same few questions of every candidate, which caused three issues:
- Administrative problems: Finding time slots that worked for both recruiters and Rider were difficult.
- Data problems: Conducting interviews manually meant that data lived in multiple different silos, which meant the team had no single source of truth for all recruiting data.
- Scale problems: The company tripled its Rider recruiting capacity, which would have required hiring four full-time recruiters to manage the process.
Challenges for Rider
Many Rider candidates also worked on other gig platforms when they applied to Packaly. Unfortunately, a common situation occurred where the person would get a gig offer from another platform that coincided with their Packaly interview.
This was not only hampering Packaly’s ability to recruit, the experience was awful for candidates as well. Left unchecked, the company risked a significant pillar of its business.
Finding Willo
Before finding Willo, Justin and his team tried a well-known virtual interviewing platform but found themselves uncomfortable with it. The platform had a lot of features but didn’t offer an open API or integrations, making it difficult to build a custom white-labeled candidate experience.
After a couple of months of frustration, Justin learned about Willo, in particular, the numerous integrations the platform powers and its open API.
Despite not being a coder himself, Justin was able to get the basic platform set up and integrated using both Zapier and Willo’s API documentation. Now, Packaly has an asynchronous video interview experience where candidates can record video answers to questions on their own time, prompted by automated reminders from the Willo platform.
With an automated, asynchronous interview system, candidates never have to worry about choosing between a gig and interviewing for Packaly. Willo also saved the team so much time that Rider recruiting was able to be put as a subtask of the support team instead of needing to hire over four full-time recruiters to manage the workload.
“We wanted to make interviewing as user-friendly as possible for candidates,” said Justin. “Willo’s integrations and open API made that a lot easier.”
Working with the Willo team
On top of platform benefits, Justin liked that the Willo team was available with strategic tips and problem-solving.
Interview completion: Justin noticed that the async video process had a low completion rate to start. The Willo team helped them shorten their interviews to five questions or fewer, which Willo data showed is the ideal number to help increase interview completion rates. It worked.
Candidate engagement: Leveraging automated SMS and email reminders from the Willo platform, Packaly was able to better communicate with candidates at scale and nudge them to complete their interviews.
Data fidelity: Packaly also had a challenge of duplicate data arising from data silos in the company. Willo helped them create unique invite codes for candidates that made it easy to deduplicate databases for easier candidate management.
Willo is simple and affordable
Looking back on why he likes Willo, Justin said it’s because the platform simply works and is affordable for the value it creates. He said other platforms might talk about extensive feature lists, but many don’t apply to growing startups that need to be nimble. Willo, on the other hand, does one thing - asynchronous interviews - really, really well.
“Willo does the simple thing right, and that’s what competitors don’t have,” said Justin.
