Worth Search Submits 41% More Candidates on Stardex - Without Lowering the Bar

Worth Search has spent seven years placing engineers, product and ops leaders, and go-to-market talent for venture-backed startups. Nolan Greenberg founded the firm in 2019 and now leads a team of 25 recruiters running mostly contingency search, with some retained, embedded, and legal-recruiting work mixed in.

Worth Search wasn’t unhappy with their old ATS — they’d used it for almost seven years and nobody was pushing to leave. What changed their mind was AI-native search.

Our old system was only as good as what a recruiter remembered to tag. With Stardex, if you forget to tag a candidate’s Series B experience, it doesn’t matter — the database already knows.

— Nolan Greenberg, Founder, Worth Search

That matters because Worth Search’s clients often ask for stage-specific candidates, and under the old system that context lived in a recruiter’s head or didn’t exist at all. AI-personalized outreach closed the other half of the gap: pulling the right candidates is only part of the job, and Stardex now helps the team customize outreach at scale instead of writing every message by hand.

The Results

Since fully switching to Stardex in January, Worth Search is submitting an average of 68 qualified candidates a week to clients, up from 48 before — a sustained 41% increase. In the first three months after go-live, that number ran even higher, averaging 72 a week (+47%).

The increase in volume hasn’t cost them on quality. Worth Search holds itself to getting roughly 85% of submitted resumes requested for interview, and that bar hasn’t moved.

That metric hasn’t fallen off, despite the fact that we’re submitting almost 50 more candidates.

— Nolan Greenberg, Founder, Worth Search

Their placement rebate rate — a proxy for bad hires — is unchanged and still far under 1%. Nolan puts the overall recruiter efficiency gain at 30–35%.

Building on Top of Stardex

What’s kept Worth Search building is that Stardex works as a data layer their own tools can plug into, not just an interface recruiters click through. The team built an automation using the Stardex MCP server that scans every engineering candidate added in the last two weeks whenever a new role opens, scores them against the role, and Slacks the recruiter who owns any strong match. Another pings a recruiter 30 minutes after an interview wraps, so follow-up happens while it’s fresh.

We would not have half the stuff we can do now if we’d stayed with our past ATS. You can just build your own features with Stardex.

— Nolan Greenberg, Founder, Worth Search

The Takeaway

Worth Search switched ATS systems not because the old one was broken, but because they saw a ceiling on a system that only knew what a recruiter remembered to type in. Stardex doesn’t have that ceiling.

Think of it as the base layer for your firm’s whole stack — it can talk to everything, connect with everything.

— Nolan Greenberg, Founder, Worth Search