How H.W. Anderson Made 100,000+ Candidate Profiles Searchable Again

Company: H.W. Anderson

Who: ~40 recruiters across New York, Edinburgh, Dublin, and Dubai

What: Buy-side executive search: portfolio managers, traders, quants, and analysts for hedge funds and trading firms

Before Spott: Loxo + Quill + LinkedIn Recruiter, stitched together by hand

H.W. Anderson was not an unhappy ATS customer. Managing Director Peter Henry describes the firm as one of the happier Loxo customers when they started looking around. That is what makes this case study interesting: they did not switch because something was broken. They switched because of what their data could be worth.

"Spott transformed how we use our data, making every conversation searchable and unlocking value with AI."
Peter Henry, Managing Director, H.W. Anderson

The problem: valuable data you cannot ask questions of

H.W. Anderson places front-office investment talent for hedge funds, proprietary trading firms, and commodity merchants. Over years of work across four offices, they had built a database of more than 100,000 candidates, enriched daily with call transcripts from Quill, their phone-notes tool.

And then the value leaked out:

• Notes were not searchable. Call summaries flowed into the ATS automatically, then sat in a field the search engine could not see. The workaround was manually copy-pasting notes into a second, searchable field, a job that ran permanently behind.
• Search was keywords or nothing. Peter's benchmark query was simple: "TMT portfolio manager, market neutral, New York City, works at a hedge fund." There was enough information in the database to answer it. The system could not.
• LinkedIn was a parallel universe. No integration meant recruiters lived in two systems, adding profiles one by one and copy-pasting messages, with no reliable record of who was last contacted when.
• Even "has a CV" lied. LinkedIn PDF exports were counted as CVs, so nobody could tell which profiles actually had a real resume on file.

The firm was collecting gold and storing it somewhere nobody could dig.

Why Spott

The demo moments that landed were all variations of the same theme, your data finally answering back:

• Conversational search across everything. CVs, notes, transcripts, and messages, queried in plain language, with a vector database underneath instead of keyword matching.
• LinkedIn, WhatsApp, and email in one inbox. Messages send from the candidate record and sync both ways. "Wow. So they don't need to leave Spott, they just do it in Spott and move on to the next thing."
• A migration that respects momentum. Free data migration with a test environment first, cutover on a weekend, training the week before, and hypercare after. The team did not have to change how they worked, because capturing the information was never their problem. Searching it was.

What changed

H.W. Anderson went live with around 40 users at the start of 2026 and was on Spott's "loving it" list within weeks (that is a real internal customer health stage, and they are on it). The manual note-copying job is gone. The double-life between the ATS and LinkedIn is gone. And the decade of conversations they brought with them is now, retroactively, a searchable asset.

That is the part worth underlining for any firm sitting on an old database: your historical data is not stuck at the value your old ATS assigned it. Move it somewhere that can read it, and it appreciates.

How much of your database can you actually search? Book a demo and find out what is in there.