Loxo ATS vs Spott

Loxo is very proud of its sourcing capabilities. It aggressively markets its database of 1.2B+ candidates as an alternative for expensive LinkedIn recruiter licenses. Many users however find that these sales promises often fail to materialize in practice.

An example: The database misses many profiles, even on long-time LinkedIn users, raising concerns about data quality and timeliness. When we tried to get a feel for the database’s size, a simple search for all possible candidates (through filtering for all possible ‘Tenure’ options) only returned about 226 million profiles. This is a likely a more realistic number of profiles that have meaningful career data associated with them.

They claim to auto-update these profiles based on LinkedIn but given the sheer number of records, it is taking several months to go through line by line, which also means that live opportunities will have passed once the data is “refreshed”.

Users often say they use it for a quick scan but still rely on LinkedIn to see a candidate’s current status. This is helpful, but it means LinkedIn Recruiter licenses remain necessary. Others, don’t use the Loxo database at all.

If their internal sourcing tool falls short, Loxo still offers a Chrome extension from which you can import single profiles - or identify candidates that are already in your ATS.

Loxo's search functionality routinely pulls up irrelevant results when searching for specific candidates. For example, searching for "Dwight Schrute" might return profiles like Christopher, Nenad, and Alexander - people who have no connection to that name whatsoever. Instead you'll want to rely on more traditional ways of working, with Boolean filters or keywords to narrow your search.

To circumvent this, Loxo is now marketing “advanced” AI capabilities to semantically search your database rather than working with filters. However, their semantic search is a bit of a workaround underneath the hood - they manually group 10-15 job title aliases such as 'developer' and 'software engineer' together to ensure to make them appear in related searches.

Spott relies on true vector search instead; this means we have a real understanding of how 'close' keywords such as Python and TensorFlow, or Clinical Researcher and Clinical Scientist are to each other, without relying on a set of aliases to define this. This means you can simply search for "senior AI/ML engineers with Python, TensorFlow or similar skills " without running the risk of missing a gold medalist in your ATS because of a missing alias.

On top of that, Spott also allows you to create custom fields that can be autofilled with AI. Need a column with total years of experience across entire career? Just create a field with these instructions and let our AI auto fill it for your entire ATS. You can filter on it afterwards. No need to set up complex filters or do the math yourself for each candidate.

You can create mass outreach campaign on Loxo - a feature not many other big platforms such as Bullhorn allow you to do out of the box. You can connect with candidates through mail, SMS, or LinkedIn. You can dynamically adapt messages based on pre-filled fields such as the relevant position, job, or user you are emailing. These outreach campaigns are easily automatable from within the platform, from auto follow-ups to decision trees based on their response.

There is still room for improvement: users cannot reply to past emails they sent to candidates, often encounter failed email automations, and have limited LinkedIn outreach capabilities. For LinkedIn campaigns, you can only set reminders to manually complete tasks - there’s no true automation. When parts of the workflow fail, it defeats the purpose, as you still end up checking and managing everything manually.

Loxo offers a portal for clients to log in and check in on ongoing assignments. Users report that the client portal generally needs more love, and is clearly a secondary focus after Search and Outreach. Clients can only see the final results, and no progress or lifecycle/funnel stages. Most agencies still send emails manually because their clients prefer not to use the client portal.

Spott started out as a tool to write candidate presentation reports. It feels like our own back yard. Using call transcripts, CVs, and job descriptions, we’ve already generated over 1,000 candidate reports directly in our clients’ Word or PowerPoint templates. We now also allow you to export pipeline updates in a single click, so you get professional reports in an instance and can go back to focus on finding and placing the right person.

Loxo has grown exponentially in the past 5 years, and it has hit their customer service the hardest. Paying users have trouble getting to speak to a live representative, with long waiting times becoming the norm. During sales calls, the team promises the world, but once you confirm and pay, many users report feeling like they've become much less of a priority.

The situation worsens when clients decide to leave. Many experience a hostile support team that tries to remove them from the platform as quickly as possible, without offering much help to transition their data out.

Loxo's pricing structure starts at $109 per month for the Starter plan, with Professional at $229 per month and Enterprise pricing available upon request.

Contract terms also create frustration, with many users discovering too late that they've signed annual rather than monthly contracts, providing little flexibility for early termination.