- Firm
- DHR Global — top 10 global retained executive search, founded 1989
- Segments
- Retained executive search · Direct hire
- Industries
- Finance · Healthcare · Retail · Technology · Industrial · Private Equity · Real Estate
- Implementation
- Custom enterprise migration with a dedicated Loxo team
Executive search at the highest level runs on trust, precision, and speed. The platform underneath has to match all three.
DHR Global is one of the largest privately held talent advisory firms in the world. Its consultants place CEOs, board members, and senior leaders for the most consequential organizations across multiple industries, including in finance, healthcare, retail, and technology. Most of its business comes from clients who return again and again — the kind of relationships where nothing can be dropped, duplicated, or delayed.
A firm operating at that level doesn't shop for software. It selects infrastructure. And DHR's leadership had already defined exactly what it wanted that infrastructure to make possible: one intelligent platform supporting its consultants, its clients, and the broader business — built for where the firm is going.
DHR had mapped that future state precisely: reporting that assembles itself in real time, in every office, in a form finance and leadership can work with directly. Performance measured one way, worldwide. Email intelligence governed with the nuance retained search demands. A single source of truth for every search, every relationship, and every metric a data-driven firm runs on — with the manual layer designed out from the start, across 500 people and every time zone.
This was a strategic decision, and DHR made it like one. The firm knew what it wanted the future state to look like. It evaluated the market against that vision. And it set out to find a partner — not a vendor — with the platform and the team to build toward it at the scale of a global business.
What the most demanding search firms in the world require from a platform
DHR's evaluation criteria are worth studying — because they flowed directly from the future state the firm had defined, and because they're the criteria any firm betting its next decade on a platform should apply.
Real-time, manipulable reporting
Live dashboards and exportable data that finance, operations, and leadership can actually work with — not static PDF snapshots that go stale the moment they're generated. Performance measured the same way in every office.
Enterprise-grade customization
A 500-person firm cannot bend itself around software defaults. Fields, workflows, permissions, dashboards, and reporting all had to be configurable to how DHR actually runs a retained search.
Governed, granular email intelligence
Email logging with real controls: capture the client and candidate communication that matters, keep internal correspondence out automatically, and give administrators genuine governance instead of an on/off switch.
Off-limits sophistication
Retained search lives and dies on client trust. Off-limits handling has to be nuanced — by client, by entity, by engagement, by time window — and enforced by the platform, not by memory and spreadsheets.
A migration that protects decades of relationship data
A global search firm's database is integral to the firm. Moving it demands a dedicated migration team, a custom implementation plan, and zero tolerance for lost history — not a self-serve import wizard.
A partner that ships at the speed of the firm
The real question in any platform decision: when the firm brings a requirement the product doesn't cover yet, what happens next — and how fast? A roadmap slide is not an answer. A shipped release is.
DHR evaluated every serious option in the market. Then it chose Loxo.
Against those criteria, the field narrowed quickly. Legacy executive search systems couldn't escape their architecture. Point tools couldn't consolidate the stack. Newer entrants couldn't demonstrate the enterprise depth — permissions, governance, customization, migration capability — that a 500-person global firm requires on day one, not on a roadmap.
Loxo was the only platform that cleared every bar. One AI-native Talent Intelligence Platform to run the entire search operation — sourcing, CRM, ATS, outreach, and reporting — as a single system. Enterprise customization across fields, workflows, permissions, dashboards, and reporting. Email governance with the granularity a retained search firm demands. And, decisively, a team prepared to partner with DHR and build toward its vision — at a depth of collaboration that, as the months ahead would prove, no other vendor in the industry was structured to deliver.
As we looked ahead to our future growth, we knew we needed more than a technology system. We needed a partner that could support the complexity, scale, and ambitions of our global business. Loxo has given us a platform that helps our teams work more efficiently, turn data into actionable insight, and continue delivering exceptional outcomes for our clients.
What “enterprise partner” actually means at Loxo
Most vendors staff an enterprise account with a CSM and a support queue. Loxo built DHR an organization.
Dedicated Strategic Accounts team
Senior ownership of the DHR relationship — accountable for outcomes across every office and time zone, not ticket response times.
Business Transformation Consultant
Embedded expertise translating DHR's operating model into platform design — workflows, permissions, and reporting built around how the firm actually runs a search.
Dedicated Project Management team
A global rollout across 500 people and 22 countries, run with the discipline of the enterprise program it is.
Strategic Data Migration team
Decades of relationship history — candidates, clients, engagements, activity — moved with a custom migration plan built for a firm where the database is integral to business operations.
Daily and weekly release cadence
Requests don't enter a roadmap backlog measured in quarters. They ship — in releases that land every week, and often every day.
Executive sponsorship
DHR's priorities are reviewed at the top of Loxo — a standing commitment from leadership, not an escalation path.
A dedicated Product, Design, and Engineering team — focused solely on DHR
This is the part no one else in the industry offers. Loxo assigned DHR its own product, design, and engineering team, working exclusively on DHR's top priorities. Not a shared services pool. Not professional services billed by the hour. A standing product team whose roadmap is DHR's roadmap.
The result is co-innovation in the truest sense: DHR brings the perspective and requirements of a large, global executive search organization; Loxo listens, moves quickly, and builds alongside it.
releases shipped during onboarding and implementation alone — work that has pushed both organizations further.
~100 software releases. Built together. During implementation alone.
Every mark below is a release the Loxo and DHR product teams shipped together during onboarding and implementation — landing daily and weekly, not quarterly. Highlights include an Outlook extension application built from the ground up, purpose-built Executive Search Reporting, and Hiring Portal enhancements designed around DHR's client experience — co-innovation that now strengthens the platform for the broader executive search industry.
The world’s most demanding firms are making the same call
When this top 10 global retained search firm — 500 employees, across 50 offices, and decades of client relationships on the line — evaluates the entire market and chooses one platform, that decision carries information the rest of the industry should read carefully.
DHR's move reflects what the leaders of the next decade already understand: the manual layer is over. Reporting that assembles itself. A database that maintains its own hygiene. Workflows shaped to the firm instead of the firm shaped to the software. And underneath it all, a partner whose product, design, and engineering teams treat your priorities as their roadmap — a depth of collaboration that pushes both organizations further.
Loxo has been building toward this for over a decade — the AI-native Talent Intelligence Platform that the world's best firms trust with the work that matters most.
Frequently asked
Can Loxo support a global, multi-office executive search firm?
Yes. DHR Global runs 500 employees and 350 consultants on Loxo across 60+ markets in 22 countries — every global time zone. Enterprise rollouts at this scale are run by a dedicated Loxo Project Management team with a Business Transformation Consultant embedded to map the firm's operating model into the platform before go-live.
How does Loxo handle a migration from a legacy executive search system?
Enterprise migrations are handled by Loxo's Strategic Data Migration team with a custom migration plan — contacts, companies, engagements, pipeline history, activities, and attachments — built around the principle that a search firm's database is the firm itself. DHR's implementation was a fully custom migration.
What if our firm needs capabilities Loxo doesn't have yet?
This is where Loxo's model is unlike anything else in the industry. For strategic customers, Loxo dedicates product, design, and engineering resources to the customer's own priorities — and builds alongside them. During DHR's onboarding and implementation, the Loxo and DHR teams shipped ~100 releases together — including an Outlook extension built from the ground up, purpose-built Executive Search Reporting, and Hiring Portal enhancements — on a daily and weekly release cadence.
Does Loxo support nuanced off-limits and email governance requirements?
Yes. Retained search firms require granular control — including preventing internal email from being logged automatically and enforcing sophisticated off-limits rules by client, entity, and engagement. These requirements were central to DHR's evaluation and are supported in Loxo's enterprise configuration.
