Why One of the World’s Top Executive Search Firms Rebuilt Its Entire Operating System on Loxo
DHR Global runs retained executive search across every time zone on Earth — 350 consultants, 500 employees, 60+ markets. When the firm went looking for the platform to carry its next decade, it evaluated the entire market. It chose Loxo.
- Firm
- DHR Global — top-10 global retained executive search, founded 1989
- Segments
- Retained executive search · Direct hire
- Industries
- Finance · Healthcare · Retail · Technology
- 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 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 the infrastructure it had been running on — a legacy executive search system layered with point tools for sourcing, enrichment, and outreach — had become the bottleneck.
The symptoms were the ones every large search firm will recognize: reporting that arrived days late and only as static PDFs, so finance and leadership couldn't work with their own numbers. No standard way to measure consultant or search performance across offices. Email logging so blunt it captured what it shouldn't and missed what it should. Weekly manual Excel updates just to know where searches stood. No reliable view of time-to-fill or the metrics a data-driven firm runs on. Manual process stacked on manual process, multiplied across 500 people and every time zone.
DHR didn't need a nicer database. It needed to eliminate the manual layer entirely — and it needed a partner capable of meeting the operational demands of a firm its size.
What the most demanding search firms in the world require from a platform
DHR's evaluation criteria are worth studying, 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 — office by office, practice by practice.
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 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 needs something the product doesn't do 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 replace the legacy ATS and collapse the point-tool stack around it. Enterprise customization across fields, workflows, permissions, dashboards, and reporting. Email governance with the granularity a retained search firm demands. And a level of partnership that, as implementation would prove, no other vendor in the industry was structured to deliver.
We run one of the most demanding executive search firms in the world, and Loxo is the platform I want us building on for the next decade. It’s powerful enough for 350 consultants across every time zone — and simple enough that I use it myself. I never want to leave.
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 the business.
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 proof: 100+ custom releases shipped during onboarding and implementation alone.
100+ custom software releases. During implementation. For one customer.
Every mark below is a release Loxo shipped for DHR during onboarding and implementation — landing daily and weekly, not quarterly. Highlights include a completely custom Outlook extension application, purpose-built Executive Search Reporting, and Hiring Portal enhancements designed around DHR's client experience.
The world’s most demanding firms are making the same call
When a top-10 global retained search firm — 350 consultants, offices in every time zone, 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.
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.
See what DHR saw
Walk through the same evaluation the world's top search firms run — and see the platform they chose, live against your own use cases.
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. During DHR's onboarding and implementation, Loxo shipped more than 100 custom software releases — including a completely custom Outlook extension, 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.
Ready to shape the future?
Your job is placing the best talent in the roles that will define their careers, their lives, and our future. Our job is making it easier for you to do it.
