How VC-backed Willo® grew a development team in the Philippines without ever visiting
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TL;DR - Key Results:
- 🙋🏽♂️ 10 developers hired in the Philippines without visiting
- 🔥 Initial requirement of 2 engineers sourced & onboarded in 3 weeks
- ⏳ 825 estimated hours saved in recruitment
- ❤️ 4 years of team support and developer training
The customer
Willo is a video interviewing platform built to humanise the hiring process. Designed for hiring teams tired of screening endless CVs and sitting through misaligned interviews, Willo enables candidates to record responses to pre-set questions - helping employers quickly assess presentation, attitude, and communication before hopping on a live call. With AI-powered summaries, digital ID checks, and pre-screening tools, Willo is trusted by thousands of companies globally to reduce time-to-hire and improve the candidate experience.
When Euan Cameron and Hamish Livingston set out to build Willo, they shared a clear vision: transform how businesses connect with candidates through simple, scalable video technology. With Euan’s 15 years of entrepreneurial experience and Hamish’s product expertise from founding and leading digital ventures, they recognised both the opportunity and the challenge of scaling a global platform from startup roots.
Hamish and Euan from Willo share their experience working with Cloud Employee over the past four years - from building their remote team to what makes the partnership work so well.
The problem
As a fast-growing startup, Willo’s small in-house team needed to keep momentum on their product without being slowed by long hiring cycles. Recruiting locally would have meant months of interviews and onboarding, with costs the business couldn’t absorb at speed. Managing remote hires directly also risked adding layers of payroll and HR admin that would slow things further. Most importantly, the expertise they needed would have been far harder, and slower, to secure through local hiring alone.
Key operational challenges:
- Lean founding team with limited capacity to manage recruitment alongside product growth
- Local hiring would have meant long timelines and heavy founder involvement in interviews and onboarding
- Added complexity of managing payroll, time off, and compliance for remote hires independently
There’s a lot of logistical stuff as well that you don’t really think about, you know, in terms of payroll, time off, vacations, salaries.
The solution
To accelerate growth, Willo turned to Cloud Employee to build a dedicated remote team. Instead of navigating lengthy recruitment cycles locally, Cloud Employee headhunted the top 10% of tech talent in the Philippines - chosen for both technical expertise and cultural alignment. From the start of hiring to having new team members fully onboarded into Willo’s workflow took just three weeks, dramatically reducing pressure on a lean in-house team.
This approach gave Willo rapid access to high-quality talent while avoiding the costs and delays of traditional hiring. With every candidate ready to contribute from day one, the startup could stay focused on scaling its platform with confidence.
Willo's software engineering partnership with Cloud Employee has:
- Built a dedicated remote team spanning frontend development, QA, sales support, and virtual assistance
- Accessed the top 10% of tech talent in the Philippines, carefully selected for technical expertise and cultural alignment
- Gained rapid access to high-quality talent while avoiding the costs and delays of traditional hiring
Getting the right candidates who were already pre-screened, has been a massive time saver for us.
The impact
Over time, what began as an extension of capacity has evolved into a genuine cultural partnership. Several developers have now been with Willo for more than three years, bringing not only continuity and technical expertise, but also a deep sense of ownership and alignment with the company’s ethos. This cultural integration has had a profound impact - illustrated, for example, by one Cloud Employee developer who delivered a company-wide masterclass, a passion project inspired by Willo’s founder. It’s just one of many stories that demonstrate how these developers enrich Willo beyond their roles: the session motivated teams across the business, and the sales team even reported applying what they learned directly in client conversations with great effect.
With Cloud Employee also managing the operational load - from payroll and leave management to HR support and scaling logistics - growth no longer creates friction. Instead, Willo can move quickly, adapt confidently, and expand globally knowing that its extended team is stable, capable, and fully invested in its vision.
Key impacts achieved through partnering with Cloud Employee:
- Long-term team stability driving continuity and ownership
- Company culture enriched through developer-led initiatives and knowledge-sharing
- Frictionless global scaling enabled by Cloud Employee operations
It’s definitely opened the doors to a whole new pool of talent that we couldn’t have tapped into before, or it certainly would have been a lot harder.
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