Why EA First chose customised DaXtra solutions to ensure scalable growth


A DaXtra Technologies Case Study

EA First Case Study PDF EA First stands for Expert Advisers First. It was created in 2019 by experienced recruiter David McGarry out of an ethos to make a difference. EA First quickly achieved success, weathering the storm of the pandemic as it grew from two recruiters at the start, to a team of nine by the end of 2020.

The Challenge

When we first spoke to David McGarry, it was at the Recruitment Agency Expo London in February 2020. He had a team of six recruiters and was planning to move to Bullhorn as a CRM. One of the key selling points of Bullhorn for David was the ability to use its marketplace partners to build a tech stack – since then he has integrated Cloudcall, Cube19, Broadbean and Odro. He knew of DaXtra’s reputation for data capture, loading candidates and semantic search – he was very impressed when he saw what we could do. Then Covid-19 hit and David needed to look carefully at how he grew the business, so we put the project on hold.

Fast forward six months and David got back in touch. He now had nine recruiters in the team. They were all experienced consultants with a high level of expertise. He was looking for senior level candidates in the accountancy sector in an exact location: they had to be based in the Cambridge area. David felt that he was missing candidates searching by radius of the city within Bullhorn. He wanted to find out if he could see better results using DaXtra’s ability to search location more precisely - by exact postcode.

The Solution

“DaXtra was able to customise its automation and search solutions to our specific requirements, so we can find the perfect candidates to fill our jobs.” David McGarry, Executive Director, EA First

David had very specific requirements when searching for candidates. As well as needing to be precise about the candidate location, he also wanted to search for candidates who had accountancy qualifications and see their level of relevant experience. With DaXtra Search Nexus, he was able to use the new Term Categorisation feature to focus in on accountancy qualifications. David wanted to be able to identify the year that candidates qualified, so we built an enhancement to find this information using our natural language processing.

David was also keen to use automation to reduce the admin burden on his recruiters. He chose DaXtra Capture to automate loading candidate data into Bullhorn, with specific requirements such as setting candidates as looking for temp work based upon the pattern of their previous employment. The DaXtra Styler add-on allowed him to automate creating branded CVs while also converting PDFs to Word if any editing was needed by his team.

The Results

“A key advantage of DaXtra Search Nexus is connecting the language of recruiters with the language of candidates.” David McGarry, Executive Director, EA First

EA First is just starting to use DaXtra’s solutions but the impact is already clear. DaXtra Search Nexus allows them to source candidates quickly and accurately across job boards, social platforms and their Bullhorn database.

They had previously employed an administrator to style CVs and now their time is available for other activities. EA First is looking forward to saving hours a day which was previously spent on admin such as processing and searching data.

David is a very tech-savvy buyer and chooses technology carefully so he can grow his business scalably. We’re delighted to be part of their growth story.


David-McGarry-headshotDavid McGarry

Executive Director, EA First

David McGarry set up EA First in 2019. He is an experienced recruiter, with his previous role as a Director at Page Group, where he worked for over eight years.