How Sage Recruiting Doubled Speed and Improved Database Usage by Switching From Bullhorn to Loxo

For more than a decade, Ashley Alfred has built Sage Recruiting by operating in one of the toughest corners of tech recruiting: early-stage startups.

As Founder and Principal Recruiter, Ashley specializes in placing Software Product and Engineering talent for companies where every hire shapes the future of the business. Speed matters… but quality matters more.

As Sage Recruiting grew, Ashley ran into a problem: the tools meant to support the work were actually slowing them down.

“[Loxo] has improved our workflow, our speed, and our communication both internally and externally. I’m very, very happy with the decision. I think compared to what’s out there, it is the best CRM for recruiting. I think Loxo will replace Bullhorn, which was the market leader.”

— Ashley Alfred, Founder and Principal Recruiter, Sage Recruiting

When your workflow lives in too many places, quality becomes fragile

Sage Recruiting was running on Bullhorn, a platform Ashley describes like this: “It seems simple. And then you get into it and you realize it’s complex, and things just don’t work the way that they should.”

To make Bullhorn usable, the team needed to layer on extra tools for sourcing, contact data, and email automation – creating a Frankenstack.

“We had multiple different products,” Ashley explains. “We had ContactOut, we used Woodpecker for email automation. We had another tool for sourcing.” 

Each tool worked in isolation. Recruiters spent time switching back and forth instead of recruiting, and leadership had no clean way to see what was working across searches.

For a boutique firm competing in fast-moving tech markets, that fragmentation made quality harder to maintain and productivity impossible to compound.

Looking for a system, not another tool

Ashley did her homework. She demoed multiple platforms before she landed on Loxo as her solution.

“I’ve done an extensive amount of research,” she says. “From what I’ve seen and all the demos that I’ve done, it is by far the best.”

What stood out wasn’t a feature checklist, it was how Loxo approached the recruiting workflow as a whole. Sourcing, outreach, pipeline management, reporting, and client collaboration lived in one system, designed to be used the same way across the team.

Migration that actually worked: “I kept thinking it was too easy”

Anyone who’s lived through a platform migration expects disruption. Ashley was shocked that wasn’t the case at Loxo.

“Oh, geez, that [migration] was beautiful.”

She’s been through migrations before, but not like this.

During the process, she kept waiting for something to go wrong. “It was too easy. And then I look at the data and I’m like, ‘okay, it’s perfect. How did they do this?’”

With no data loss, no cleanup, and no productivity dip, the team was able to keep working without missing a beat.

Productive on day one — and still improving months later

One of the most striking things about the switch: the team was productive immediately. “You can start using it successfully on day one,” Ashley says. 

But unlike simpler tools that cap out quickly, Loxo continued to reveal more value over time. “Months later you’re still learning things about the system. Loxo has a lot of features… but it’s not complex. As you learn more, you just become more and more efficient.”

The difference from Bullhorn was immediate and measurable, especially in sourcing and outreach. With Bullhorn, bringing candidates into the database was, in Ashley’s words, “the most arduous process.”

With Loxo, everything changed. “We’re now able to source and email candidates at, I would say, 100% more speed.”

Outreach became a single, connected flow. “If you want to send candidates an email – one click. A campaign? Simple. You’ve set up your emails over the next two weeks for that person, and you can personalize every single one.”

The team stopped complaining about using their platform. In fact, they stopped complaining entirely.

“I no longer have a team of people complaining to me all day” about how the database doesn’t work. Ashley says. “I don’t get those complaints anymore, ever.”

Consolidation as strategy, not a convenience

For Sage Recruiting, consolidation wasn’t about fewer logins. It was about aligning the entire team around one shared way of working.

“I think the biggest thing about Loxo is the fact that it’s all integrated,” Ashley says. “Everything that you need to do is in this system.”

That integration delivered immediate practical value:

• Sourcing: Instead of bouncing between different sourcing tools, the team now uses Loxo Source as their primary sourcing engine. “The quality and correctness of the candidates that come out are getting better.”
• Outreach: Sequences run directly from the platform where candidate relationships live, halving (or more) Sage Recruiting’s time spent.
• Client collaboration: Using Loxo’s Hiring Manager Portal, Sage turned client communication into a shared workflow. No more PDFs or email chains

“We’re able to bring our clients into the platform and show them our submissions,” Ashley says. “They can review candidate profiles, answer our questions right there, and after interviews, they just click in and leave feedback. We get it instantly.”

The feedback triggers automation: “It’ll automatically move the candidate to the next stage based on the client’s feedback. The automation throughout the whole system is incredibly impressive.”

For Ashley, the most valuable shift was moving from tool-hopping to a workflow that actually compounds over time.

Internal communication became seamless. “The communication between my team is amazing.” Instead of Slack threads, email chains, and scattered notes, everything happens in context, right where the work is.

And crucially, the platform keeps getting better. Ashley noticed this early: “One of the things that I find interesting is it always gets better. There’s huge improvements here.”

Reporting that works: “No more spreadsheets”

For Ashley, reporting was critical. In fact, it was the breaking point with Bullhorn.

Bullhorn had sold her an expensive bolt-on reporting product that promised specific capabilities. It didn’t deliver. That was “the straw that broke the camel’s back.”

With Loxo, Ashley finally has the reporting she needs… and it takes a fraction of the time to generate.

“No more spreadsheets. No more Excel docs. Now I just click on the reports. They’re beautiful, and visual. Whether she’s checking on money in the pipeline or how many calls her recruiters are doing, “everything is right there.”

But it’s not just internal reporting. For each job, Ashley can share a client-facing report that shows where candidates are dropping off and why, so clients can react faster and stay aligned with the market. That leads to more collaboration, and oftentimes, more placements.

“You can say, ‘look, people are declining because you want them in office. Or your salary is too low. Look at the salaries of the people that we’re talking to and look at your salary – there’s a disconnect.’”

This high-impact reporting shifted Sage’s role from status updater to trusted advisor.

The AI helper that actually helps

When you run a recruiting firm, you don’t just recruit — you also become the default help desk. Every “how do I…?” question pulls you out of the work that actually moves the business forward. For Ashley, Loxo’s AI helper, Artemis, became the pressure release valve.

“That AI is the best. Unbelievable, how good it is at helping.”

Now, it’s her team’s first stop when they’re stuck… instead of pinging Ashley. When questions come up, she tells them, “Ask the AI, don’t ask me.” And it stuck.

“The AI explains it better than I would anyways,” Ashley laughs.

The result: fewer interruptions, faster answers, and real time back. “Now they're able to find answers to their questions and their problems without me having to do everything. The amount of time it's saved has been incredible.”

The bottom line: a system that scales with the firm

Sage Recruiting didn’t just switch platforms. They replaced improvisation with a repeatable workflow, gained real visibility into their searches, and built a system that gets more productive with every hire.

“The platform has improved our workflow and our speed and our communication, both internally and externally.”

“I’m very, very happy with the decision. I think compared to what’s out there, it is the best CRM for recruiting. I think Loxo will replace Bullhorn, which was the market leader, and which is now going downhill.”