Building an 18-person outsourced marketing team across 9 countries | Rachel Thomson

Willo is a candidate screening platform that helps hiring teams assess candidates at scale using structured, AI-assisted assessments instead of resumes alone. What launched in 2020 as a one-way video interviewing tool has evolved into a screening platform whose candidates complete assessments in more than 195 countries, with North America now driving roughly 55% of the company's revenue.In a recent episode of The Marketers of Technology, we sat down with Rachel Thomson, Chief Marketing Officer at Willo, to learn how she runs an 18-person marketing team that is entirely outsourced across nine countries and six time zones, and rebuilt the company's category positioning around language pulled directly from sales calls.Topics Discussed:How Rachel structured an entirely outsourced, 18-person marketing team so it doesn't bottleneck through herWhy she rebuilt Willo's category positioning from sales call recordings instead of internal consensusHow segmenting ICP by hiring frequency, not company size, determines Willo's funnel architectureWhy Willo's biggest demand-gen campaign, CV Free, targets candidates instead of the employers who pay for the platformWhat it means to keep AI limited to surfacing a shortlist while employers retain the final hiring decisionGTM and Marketing Lessons:Structure an outsourced team so it runs like a department, not a vendor stack: Willo's 18-person marketing function spans nine countries and six time zones, and every person on it is an agency, fractional, or contractor. Rachel said the real work wasn't assembling the roster, it was forcing direct handoffs between functions: "It takes a bit of heavy lifting, bringing your team together and telling organic to speak to paid. But when that starts to work and they start speaking to each other, it's amazing to see."Rebuild category language from sales call data, not internal consensus: When Willo's product expanded past video interviews, Rachel didn't run a positioning workshop. She had the team listen to Gong recordings of live sales calls to hear exactly how customers were describing the product. Customers kept calling it "candidate screening," so that became the external category term, replacing whatever language the roadmap team had been using internally.Split ICP by hiring frequency, and let that decide your funnel: Willo's ICP work goes past firmographics. "At a real simple term, we have occasional hires and we have always hiring teams as well," Rachel said, drawing the line between a coffee shop hiring one barista a year and an enterprise hiring daily. That split is what routes a prospect to self-serve sign-up versus a sales-assisted demo.Fund demand-gen for the side of the market that never signs a contract: Willo's paying customer is the employer, but adoption depends on candidates agreeing to interview through the platform. As Rachel put it, "The candidate as well has to want to go through an interviewing process with tools like Willo. Otherwise, employers aren't going to come to us and say we need to buy this tool." The CV Free campaign was built to win over candidates, not buyers.Let AI own the shortlist, not the decision: Employers feed Willo a "blueprint," their values, job description, and scoring matrix, and every candidate response is scored against it. But Rachel was clear about where the line stays: "The human is always going to make the decision, so the employer is always going to make the decision. What Willo is going to do is just help them get there faster, fairer, and more confidently than ever before."Sponsors: Front Lines - Silicon Valley's leading Podcast Production Studio. We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. Mention you are a listener and get a 10% discount. www.FrontLines.io/Podcast-as-a-Service