UK Right-to-Work Checks Are Really Annoying. So We Built Something to Make Them Better.

As of October 1st the UK officially ended pandemic-era temporary changes to the right-to-work check process.

Thankfully, you can still check digitally—many folks were worried the digital element would be completely removed. 

If you go back to the "old" way of doing right to work checks, your candidates have to travel to your office, documents in hand, for you to check manually. It’s a non-scalable process, to say the least, particularly if you have to pay for candidates to travel. Oh, and if you don’t do it right? You get fined up to £20,000 (~$22,000 USD).

So we set out to build an easy video-based solution.

A beautifully simple ID check

Willo makes video interviewing easy (we’ve conducted over 100,000 interviews in 195 countries). Both candidates and recruiters tell us they love it.

So, perhaps naturally, I think both groups deserve a better right-to-work verification process.

Credit where it’s due, I appreciate the UK government for continuing to enable digital checks. Had those gone out when the pandemic changes ended, it would have been disastrous for remote work. But the “digital” experience still requires a lot of manual work from all parties. Willo’s version does a lot of this work automatically. 

Here’s how Willo’s new ID verification and right-to-work check feature actually gets the job done:

1 - Candidates show documentation on video

Companies can ask candidates, as part of the interview process, to verify their ID with a 360-degree selfie and government-issued identity document upload. This is held in an encrypted, ISO 27001-compliant platform. Candidates do this with their computer or mobile phone camera, same as if they were going on a Zoom call.

2 - Willo verifies the ID

Willo automatically checks that the ID provided is genuine and looks for any risks of ID tampering (against a database featuring IDs from over 200 countries and territories). This is available in bulk for large business plans and is available pay-as-you-go for smaller businesses looking to control their expenses. 

Bonus: If the candidate is from the UK or the Republic of Ireland, we ping the Home Office in real time for a right-to-work certification. We'll also capture the candidate's share code. That means employers can make offers on the spot without any illegal employment risks.

3 - That’s it

I know startups are supposed to generate a three-step process to illustrate their product’s use case. But honestly, I wanted this to be easy—candidates input the information and we do the rest. There is no third step cause the process is done.

Candidates and companies deserve better

Candidates deserve a fully-remote onboarding process that doesn’t require travel to an office with government documents. Even if the work is hybrid or in-person, completing verification digitally provides a more secure and practical experience for them—they can focus their first day on getting to work rather than sitting with HR staring at their passport.

Recruiters and employers more broadly deserve less hassle as they comply with government regulations. They also deserve to keep sensitive data out of their email inbox, reducing the risks associated with a breach or inadvertent sharing. And where possible, employers deserve instant updates, which they can get with Willo if a candidate lives in the UK or the Republic of Ireland (PS: we’ll add more countries as we can!).

Our working world is going through a huge evolution and the chorus of change is, thankfully, getting louder. I love seeing people questioning time-aged processes that have become more like traditions to yield to rather than ways of work that can (and should) be improved.

The government has taken a good first step in recognizing the power and validity of digital verification. But the system needed improvement the moment it went live—hopefully, that’s what Willo’s new solution will do for candidates and employers alike.

Create a Willo account or add Digital Identity Checks to your existing account and give it a go!