ESP Advisory “Thrive allows me to pull 50–150 relevant candidates instantly at the start of a new search, saving ~2 days of work per search.” – Mica Burke, Client Services, ESP Advisory ESP Advisory is a search-to-search firm that specializes in hiring partners and directors into search firms globally. Challenge ESP Advisory’s candidates are often potential clients (or competitors), so data accuracy isn’t just a nice-to-have—it is the essential foundation of the business. Candidate tenure in their niche tends to be 10–15 year cycles. Before implementing Thrive TRM, the ESP Advisory team had to rebuild candidate lists from scratch for every search. Given the extended timeframe between when candidates were actively looking for new opportunities, relationship history was hard to track and maintain. Solution In 2024, ESP Advisory adopted Thrive TRM as its central hub to house its executive talent network. This allowed their entire team to benefit from collective knowledge of their talent network they had built over time. Instead of starting from scratch sourcing candidates for each new search, they could add 50-150 candidates instantly who were a great fit. “My focus at ESP is sourcing, and we do very specific, targeted outreach. We utilize Thrive as our main CRM, which houses the bank of all of the candidates we are working with, whether active or inactive. In Thrive, we track their specialities and target markets in the system, along with all previous conversations.” Mica Burke, Client Services, ESP Advisory To supercharge this database even further, they integrated SourceWhale to speed up sourcing and bring their proprietary Thrive data directly into their team’s recruitment workflow. This integration allows the ESP Advisory team to view Thrive data directly on a candidate’s LinkedIn profile, which unlocked three immediate benefits: Visual Validation: A Thrive logo appears instantly on LinkedIn profiles. Without it, the candidate is assumed to be unrepresented and outreach starts right away. Heads-Up Alerts: Tags such as “In Current Process” are highlighted in red on the sidebar, making it easy to see when a candidate is already part of an active pipeline. One-Click Capture: Manual entry is obsolete. Candidates are instantly tagged and added to searches and networks in Thrive with a single click. “The SourceWhale integration saves me a lot of time bringing new people into the system because I’m able to see my Thrive data while on a candidate’s LinkedIn profile. I can quickly tell whether someone is in process, whether anyone else on the team has had a recent conversation, and whether they are actively looking, and, most importantly, if they are a good fit for that search.” Key Results By eliminating manual data entry, ESP Advisory didn’t just save time—they changed their business model. Project Velocity: By automating the initial capture of candidates, when the team is ready to kick off a new search, they save an average of 2 days’ worth of manual sourcing work and can move straight to outreach 96% Reduction in Processing Time: Adding a candidate to their central database dropped from 5 minutes to ~10 seconds per profile Maximized Consultant Capacity: As sourcing has become faster, consultants can dedicate more time to calls, generating more insights and proprietary data through conversations. The time saved on data entry is now spent on expanding their knowledge of their niche market with active candidate conversations. Their advanced use of Thrive TRM transformed a simple database into a revenue-generating market intelligence tool thanks to their automated tech stack.