Over the past six years at Thoughtworks, MaribelRuiz Gomez has built a reputation for improving how complex programs operate at scale. Starting as a recruiter coordinator and growing into her role as Global Head of TA Systems and Operations, Maribel leads initiatives that shape how teams collaborate, make decisions, and hire.
One of the most impactful programs she’s led focused on improving the company’s interview process.
For Thoughtworks, a global technology consultancy operating across EMEA, the Americas, and APAC, hiring involves hundreds of interviewers across regions, roles, and teams. Ensuring consistency while maintaining a strong candidate experience requires thoughtful systems, clear guidance, and tools that support interviewers in real time.
Maribel saw an opportunity to strengthen how interviews were run while making the process easier for the people conducting them.
Improving interview feedback and decision speed
When Maribel began evaluating BrightHire, she did not want to simply add another tool to the hiring stack. Instead, she examined how interview processes functioned end-to-end and identified opportunities to improve both efficiency and quality.
One area that quickly stood out was the time it took to complete interview feedback. By introducing BrightHire, Thoughtworks was able to significantly streamline that part of the workflow. Today, interview scorecards are typically submitted within 16 hours, down from an average of 32 hours previously, comfortably exceeding the company’s 24-hour service level agreement.
This improvement not only accelerates hiring decisions but also ensures that feedback is captured while interviews are still fresh in the interviewer’s mind.
Leading a global rollout
Implementing a new system across a global organization requires more than technology. It requires trust, transparency, and thoughtful change management.
Maribel led the rollout in a way that reflected all three.
The team began by working closely with recruiters, who quickly saw the benefit of having interview conversations captured automatically and summarized clearly. From there, Maribel coordinated a company-wide rollout, hosting live training sessions where employees configured BrightHire together and had the opportunity to ask detailed questions about how the technology works.
More than a thousand employees participated in these sessions, creating a shared understanding of how BrightHire supports interviews and how data is handled.
This approach helped Thoughtworks introduce the platform globally in a single coordinated effort rather than implementing it region by region.
Embedding BrightHire into the hiring culture
Today, BrightHire is fully integrated into Thoughtworks’ hiring workflows.
New interviewers are introduced to the platform as part of their onboarding process. During onboarding, employees complete self-paced training through the company’s learning platform, where they learn how to configure BrightHire, understand interview structure, and troubleshoot common scenarios before conducting interviews themselves.
By introducing the platform early, interviewers learn the process while they are still getting oriented in their roles, which makes the tool feel like a natural part of how hiring works rather than something they have to adopt later.
Using insights to continuously improve interviews
The data captured through BrightHire has also given Maribel and her team new ways to evaluate and improve interview quality.
One early insight came from reviewing talk ratios across interviews. While conversations were already relatively balanced, the data helped the team become more aware of how interview time was shared between interviewers and candidates. Since then, talk time has improved further, with interviews consistently maintaining a healthy balance that allows candidates the space to fully share their experience.
The team also used BrightHire to run small internal pilots to better understand how interview structure impacts outcomes. In one test, they compared interviewers that followed a structured question bank with interviewers that relied entirely on their own questions. When the question bank was used, summaries were clearer and scorecards contained stronger, more consistent feedback.
Insights like these help the team refine their interview practices while still giving interviewers flexibility in how they assess candidates. Rather than using the data as a performance tool, the focus is on learning and improving the interview process over time.
Measurable impact
Since implementing BrightHire in March, 2025, Thoughtworks has interviewed more than 30,000 unique candidates on the platform, supporting over 1,500 hires.
Beyond the numbers, Maribel sees the greatest impact in how interviews are experienced by both candidates and interviewers. Conversations are captured accurately, feedback is easier to provide, and hiring teams have a stronger foundation for making decisions.
As Maribel continues to evolve the program, her focus remains the same: using data, thoughtful process design, and collaboration to create a hiring experience that works better for everyone involved.
