The Openwork Partnership: Reducing Time to Hire With an Integrated Hiring Experience

As one of the UK’s largest financial advice networks The Openwork Partnership is growing quickly and navigating a period of significant organisational change. To support this momentum, the Talent Acquisition (TA) team needed a way to make faster, more confident hiring decisions, without increasing operational complexity or asking recruiters to work across multiple systems.

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By integrating Thrive’s behavioural assessments directly into their existing Eploy Applicant Tracking System (ATS), The Openwork Partnership has been able to bring objective psychometric data into the earliest stages of their hiring process. The result is a more streamlined, consistent, and insight-rich selection journey that helps them identify people who will thrive in a dynamic, evolving environment.

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A growing organisation with growing demands

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The Openwork Partnership has long supported a diverse network of advisers and firms. As hiring demand increased, their TA function expanded too, from a smaller team to a more strategic, insight-driven operation working hand-in-hand with the business.

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They had already been using Eploy as their ATS and careers platform for several years. In 2023, they introduced Thrive, specifically because it could integrate into Eploy and fit seamlessly into the workflow recruiters already relied on.

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The ambition was clear: bring consistent behavioural assessment to all roles, not just managerial positions, and make early screening more objective, efficient, and informative.

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A solution shaped through partnership

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Integration was non-negotiable. The Openwork Partnership did not want recruiters jumping across systems or adding administrative burden. So Eploy and Thrive worked together to embed assessments directly within the ATS.

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“One of our priorities is having everything in our ATS. If we’re having to jump through different systems, it’s just not a great way of working.”

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After collaborative discussions, the three teams agreed that Thrive should sit right at the beginning of the selection journey. Once a candidate applies and passes an initial TA screen, they’re moved into a “Testing” swimlane within Eploy, which automatically triggers the Thrive assessment. Candidates receive communication from both systems, and once completed, the overall Thrive score flows straight back into Eploy.

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If recruiters or hiring managers want more detail, they simply click through to the full Thrive report, no exporting, no manual tracking, and no duplicated work.

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The implementation required almost no technical effort on The Openwork Partnership’s side:

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“I had to generate an API key and password and that was basically the limit of my technical ability needed to get this sorted. One day it wasn’t there, and the next day it was.”

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Measurable impact on hiring efficiency

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Thrive quickly became a valuable part of early decision-making. The Openwork Partnership has seen a meaningful reduction in time to hire, dropping from 50.21 days in 2023 to 44 days in 2025 (year-to-date).

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Some of this progress is linked to wider improvements made within Eploy, such as enhanced interview scheduling and smoother application flows. But the TA team is clear that Thrive has played a major role, particularly in helping them longlist and assess candidates more efficiently.

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“Thrive has been a major player in reducing our time to hire. It’s made the TA team more productive, especially at the early selection stage.”

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A more confident, insight-driven TA function

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Rather than serving as a pass/fail threshold, the Thrive score acts as a guidance tool that supports richer, more informed conversations. The TA team uses the insights to understand which candidates align with the behaviours that matter most at The Openwork Partnership, especially resilience and adaptability.

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When scores are lower, the team can explore why. When scores are strong, they gain early confidence in suitability. Thrive’s structured interview questions also help interviewers probe more deeply, creating more meaningful, conversational interviews. Candidates often reveal more about themselves as a result.

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The impact has been twofold: faster initial filtering and more robust downstream conversations with both candidates and hiring managers. It has also strengthened TA’s role as a strategic partner, giving them objective behavioural data to support hiring recommendations rather than relying solely on subjective impressions.

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Uncovering potential in second-career talent

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One of the most powerful applications of Thrive has been within The Openwork Partnership’s Partnership Services function, where they’re hiring individuals transitioning into financial advice careers, often from completely different industries.

Recent cohorts have included people with backgrounds in beauty, teaching, policing, sports, technical roles, programme management and more. Many are small business owners or individuals with strong commercial instincts but non-traditional CVs.

Thrive has enabled the team to see beyond experience and uncover transferable behaviours such as communication, drive, resilience and learning agility.

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“We can see why they’ve been successful in their current role and how that would translate into what we’re hiring them into.”

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The team expects Thrive to become even more critical as they open future graduate schemes, where objective behavioural data will help sift large volumes of early-career applications.

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A stronger candidate experience

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Candidate response to the Thrive assessment has been overwhelmingly positive. Many describe the personalised report as insightful and accurate, something they can use for their own development even if they don’t progress.

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Some candidates have said they were disappointed not to be selected, but felt they still gained value from the process. This aligns strongly with The Openwork Partnership’s commitment to providing a high-quality, respectful candidate experience that protects and elevates their employer brand.

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A genuine three-way partnership

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This case study reflects a collaborative effort across all three parties:

• The Openwork Partnership defined where assessment should sit and championed its use across role types.
  
• Eploy provided the flexibility and responsiveness to embed Thrive into the ATS workflow.
  
• Thrive offered behavioural science, interview guidance, and ongoing product development to support Openwork’s evolving needs.
  
  

Together, they have created a seamless and scalable hiring experience, one that reduces time to hire, supports better decision-making, and gives candidates a more meaningful journey. Most importantly, it enables The Openwork Partnership to confidently identify the people who will thrive in their fast-changing, future-focused organisation.

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