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

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.

Thrive and Eploy’s partnership

Thrive’s all-in-one platform is designed to elevate your workforce through data and personalised insights — assessing cognitive ability, behaviour, and skills to make smarter, fairer people decisions.

The Thrive and Eploy partnership enables joint customers, like Openwork Partnership, to integrate Thrive’s behavioural assessments directly into Eploy's Applicant Tracking System. This helps recruitment teams:

• Improve quality and speed of hire.
• Reduce mis-hire risk. 
• Standardise fair, data-driven decisions. 
• Benchmark and identify top performers.
• Support ongoing team development.

You can learn more about the partnership by visiting Thrive’s profile on the Eploy Marketplace.

A growing organisation with growing demands

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

The Openwork Partnership has already been using Eploy as its Applicant Tracking System and careers platform for several years. In 2023, the team introduced Thrive, specifically because it could integrate into Eploy and fit seamlessly into the workflow recruiters already relied on.

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

A solution shaped through partnership

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

“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.”

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’s ATS.

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.

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

‍“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.”

Measurable impact on hiring efficiency

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).

The improvements made within Eploy — such as enhanced interview scheduling, smoother application flows, and the ability to integrate Thrive directly into the ATS — enabled The Openwork Partnership team to fully leverage behavioural assessments without needing to switch between systems. These efficiencies significantly improved their ability to longlist and assess candidates, leading to a direct positive impact on reducing time‑to‑hire.

‍“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.”

‍A genuine three-way partnership

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.