Reach ATS now integrates with Willo, so you can add intelligent interview assessments wherever they’re useful in your process.
With Willo, you have another way to meet the person behind the application. Candidates get a set of interview questions and record their answers on a phone, tablet or laptop. No need to log in, and available on any device or browser. Your team watches the responses back when it suits them, so an early interview stage no longer waits for everyone to find the same slot in the diary.
Willo sits alongside the various interview options in Reach, ready when you want it. Add it on for the roles where it helps, leave it off for the ones where it doesn’t.
Why add one-way video to your hiring process?
Arranging first-stage interviews can take longer than most teams account for. You’re matching a candidate’s availability against a hiring manager’s diary, sending the invite, chasing the reschedule, then doing the same for the next name on the list. Across a busy campaign that’s a lot of admin before anyone has been properly interviewed.
Often a full interview might not be necessary. You want to know how someone talks about their experience and why they applied, and neither of those needs a forty-minute slot.
Intelligent interview assessments gives you that without the scheduling. Candidates record their answers when they’re ready, your team reviews them later, and the stage keeps moving.
It can help you:
- Screen candidates without booking individual first-round calls
- Give candidates more choice over when they respond
- Let hiring managers review the same stage at different times
- Gather more than a CV before deciding who progresses
- Take diary pressure off bigger campaigns
Keep the question set short and it stays a shortcut for everyone involved.
Where do one-way interviews fit best?
Intelligent interview assessments can be place at any stage of the hiring journey, so it’s worth thinking about where it does the most work. Some teams put it near the top of the process, others after a first application review. A few situations where it earns its place:
High-volume shortlisting
When one vacancy brings in a few hundred applications, booking a first-stage call with everyone worth a look stops being realistic. A short Willo stage lets you send your shortlist a handful of questions and review the answers as they come back, so you’re deciding who to bring in on more than a CV and a covering letter.
Before a live interview
Sometimes a CV tells you someone can do the job, but not much about how they’d go about it. Asking a few questions beforehand gives candidates room to talk about their experience and what drew them to the role, so the live interview can start further in, on the things that really need a conversation.
When several managers need a say
Panel hiring usually means waiting for a slot that works for three or four people at once, and that wait is often the longest part of the stage. With recorded answers, each manager watches when they’ve got half an hour free and adds their feedback, and nobody has to ask the candidate to repeat themselves for a second or third audience.
When candidates and managers work different hours
Plenty of hiring happens outside a nine-to-five. Your candidates might be on shift while your hiring manager is at their desk, or your managers might be spread across several sites and regions. Giving people a window to record their answers in, rather than a slot to turn up to, makes an early stage far easier to run.
When is a live interview still the better option?
There are plenty of stages where a live conversation is worth the scheduling, and having both formats means you can pick the right one each time.
Later-stage interviews usually depend on follow-up questions and a bit of back-and-forth, so book the call. Same if you need to unpick a complex answer properly.
Some candidates will need a different format for accessibility reasons or reasonable adjustments, and your process should make it obvious how to ask.
For roles where the final call comes down to relationship, video answers can handle the early screening and free up the live conversation for what actually decides it.
What could this look like across different sectors?
Willo works anywhere, but what you’re listening for changes with the role.
🏥 Healthcare and care
These teams are often hiring for several sites at once, across shift patterns, with a lot of applications to work through. A recorded stage gives candidates room to say why they want to work in care and describe a time they supported someone, which tells you more about a person than a list of previous roles does. The ones who stand out go through to a formal interview.
🛍️ Retail and hospitality
Availability is half the conversation in retail and hospitality hiring, and it’s the part that takes longest to pin down over email. Asking candidates to record a short answer on when they can work, alongside a question or two about customer service or previous experience, gives your managers something to work from before anyone picks up the phone.
🏭 Manufacturing and logistics
If you’re recruiting across several sites, your managers are fitting hiring around shift patterns and whatever the operation needs that week. An early video stage lets candidates talk through their experience and how they’d approach a practical situation on site, while the technical and safety checks carry on where they always have, later in the process.
🏛️ Legal and professional services
With graduate and early-career roles especially, you’re often deciding who to put in front of a panel on not much more than a CV and a covering letter. A few structured questions on motivation, communication or how someone works through a problem give you a fairer read on that, and the panel interview is still there for the longer conversation.
📚 Education
Recruitment in schools, colleges and education groups nearly always involves several people, and getting them together takes planning. Collecting recorded answers first means everyone can look at the same shortlist in their own time, so by the time you’re arranging panels and formal interviews you already know who you want in the room.
How does Willo work with Reach ATS?
Adding Willo to your Reach ATS account works like this:
- Talk to the Reach team. We’ll show you Willo and talk through the roles or stages you’ve got in mind.
- Try it before you commit. If it looks like a fit, we’ll set you up with a trial so you can build a stage, run a few questions through it and see how it sits in your actual hiring process. Much easier to judge with your own roles in front of you.
- Switch on the integration. We’ll help you get Willo set up in Reach. Willo is seamlessly embedded into the Reach system, making it effortless for your team to use.
- Choose where it sits. Drop the interview stage wherever it makes sense for that workflow.
- Write your questions. Build them around what you actually need to know at that point.
- Candidates record. They get the interview and answer on whatever device they’ve got, in their own time.
- Review and progress. Responses appear in the candidate record in Reach alongside their CV, application, scores and notes. Reach Intelligence summarises their video answers, so your team can review everything in one place and move candidates forward with confidence.
What can Reach Intelligence do with your Willo interviews?
Every Willo interview adds to what Reach knows about a candidate. Reach Intelligence takes what comes back from the recorded answers and builds it into the candidate’s record, so a profile grows as someone moves through your process rather than staying fixed at whatever the application form captured on day one.
Open a candidate card and you’ve got the CV, the application and what they actually said on video, in one view. That’s useful when you’re weighing up a shortlist. It’s more useful again when someone applies for a second role a few months later and your team wants to remember why they stood out the first time.
More choice for hiring teams, more flexibility for candidates
No single interview format works for every vacancy. A high-volume entry-level campaign needs something different from a senior appointment. A shift-based role needs something different from a desk job.
This powerful partnership of Reach and Willo gives teams the flexibility to shape recruitment around those differences.
Use intelligent interview assessments when it saves you unnecessary scheduling or tells you something useful early. When a live conversation is the better call, book the live conversation.