We ship ridiculously fast at Stardex

Dynamic Market Mapping: Give it your target companies and the titles you care about, and it lays out a grid of everyone at those companies who fits, pulling from your own database. It separates current fits, past fits, and step-ups, tells you why each person passed or failed your criteria, and shows exactly where your coverage gaps are so you know which companies still need work. It’ll support external look up soon as well.

Candidate nurture campaigns: Nurture is a new campaign type built for staying in touch with candidates or near-misses, paced for long-term touch points rather than active outreach. You can drop someone into one the moment they’re placed or passed on.

Campaign recipients tab: You can now slice and dice campaign recipients and add them to new campaigns in bulk in the revamped campaign recipients tab! This allows you to retarget candidates that may not have responded to a campaign a couple months ago with a new message.

Granola integration: A lot of our customers have enjoyed using granola for note taking, and we wanted to make it easier to support that. No more Zapier workflows now as we support a native integration. Notes or full transcript flow into Stardex on the right record automatically, the same way our own notetaker does.

Phone number finder: You can now pull a mobile number for a candidate without leaving Stardex. The provider behind this costs us meaningfully more than our other data sources, so it’s a credit-based add-on rather than something included by default. If you’d like it switched on for your team, just hit reply and we’ll send you pricing + get you set up!

WhatsApp sync: You can now connect WhatsApp and we’ll sync your message history onto the right person automatically, so it lands on their timeline next to email and calls. Only messages associated to the candidates in the database are synced.

Quality of Life:

• Campaigns variables during bulk enrollment. We’ve made it much easier to clear variables, override them in bulk. We’ve also added some new default variables like search name that make it easier to use campaigns for more dynamic use cases.

• Ask Dex handles context much better. It now picks up meeting recordings and stays anchored to the candidate you’re actually looking at instead of drifting off.

• Client-visible activities on share links, you can now mark specific activities as client-visible so they show up in the client sharable link for a search while preserving the activity type.

• Added document and off-limits filters to people search, so you can narrow to who has a resume on file or exclude off-limits people outright.

• Noon and Devyce are now supported alongside our other calling integrations.

• Campaign steps that need someone to actually do something now show up as pending tasks, so they stop quietly stalling a sequence.

• Company custom fields can hold multiple companies, so target company sets, former employers, or a competitor list live in a real field instead of a text blob.

• You can now blacklist email addresses and internal domains so they never sync in, which keeps internal back-and-forth and noreply traffic off candidate timelines. More controls coming here. More confidentiality when needed.

• Scorecards save as a draft, if you close one mid-fill, so partial feedback doesn’t disappear. Or misclicks don’t cost you time.

• Smaller touches: searches with open applications now carry a Live tag, and pipeline stages take any color via a wheel or hex.

This month, we’ve made Stardex more collaborative, context-aware, and easier to use. AI search can now ask clarifying questions and account for your priorities, while the new Team Knowledge Base gives Ask Dex access to the institutional knowledge that makes your firm unique. We’ve also added smarter email workflows, better company relationship mapping, and several quality-of-life improvements across campaigns, reports, integrations, and more.

Here’s what’s new in Stardex.

AI search is now agentic

Our internal AI search used to be one-shot but now it works more like a researcher: it’s collaborative and asks you clarifying questions when your criteria are ambiguous. It allows you to prioritize the criteria, and we have updated the candidate ranking to be more relevant and the UX to be a bit cleaner.

Team Knowledge Base

Every firm has context that lives in people's heads. This client always passes on candidates without PE backing, that company's comp bands run low - or maybe it’s some other secret sauce only your team knows. You can now save that as team memory, and Ask Dex pulls the relevant bits automatically when you're working a search. In beta now!

Attachments in campaigns and email templates

For all the folks that prefer attaching PDFs to their candidate outreach, this is what you’ve been waiting for! You can now attach PDFs and Word docs to your campaigns, instead of pasting in links. This is supported in one-off email templates as well.

Email forwarding assistant

Forward an email into Stardex and we'll figure out who it belongs to and file it on the right record, no manual matching. Useful for the threads that happen outside your connected inbox, like when a client loops you in from a different address. Admins can turn it on for the team in settings, and available on the pro tier. We are still testing this, so would love to hear feedback.

Company network

On any company page you'll now see a network view of everyone in your database who has worked there and where their time overlapped. It's the fastest way to find a backchannel reference or figure out who can make an intro into an account you're trying to break into.

Quality of Life

• Goals are now in Reports. Set targets by metric, for the team or per person, and track progress against them.
• Campaign sending got safer: per-mailbox daily send limits, plus min and max gap settings so your outreach paces out naturally instead of firing all at once.
• Metaview x Stardex Integration: We’ve shipped a native integration with Metaview! Transcripts and call summaries now automatically pull into Stardex candidate profiles. Here’s a guide on enabling the integration.
• You can now block a campaign from moving forward until a task is done, useful when a step needs a human to actually do something first.
• Schedule rejection emails instead of sending them the moment you reject someone.
• The Chrome extension now shows your list of tasks, so you can breeze through them much quicker.
• API keys now support scopes, so you can hand out access that's limited to what an integration actually needs.
• Download a job share as PDF or Word, and share links now have branded thumbnails.
• Set org-wide default column layouts and reorder custom fields so everyone starts from the same view.

The latest Stardex product updates make recruiting and executive search workflows faster, more flexible, and easier to manage. June’s releases include overlapping candidate insights, AI-generated scorecard drafts, customizable client share links, business development forecasting, Gmail integration, and several workflow improvements.

Overlapping candidates

When you look at someone's experience, you'll now see an overlap badge showing where their time lined up with other people you've worked with as well as funding trajectory when they were there. Good for spotting potential backchannel references.

Candidate visibility on share links

You can now control exactly which candidates show up on an individual client share link, as well as which fields, notes, and sections a given client sees, instead of it being all or nothing.

AI scorecard drafts

We added detailed scorecards last month, and now there's a "Generate with AI" button in the scoring modal that drafts the scorecard for you based off the interview. This way, you are editing a first pass that pulls in the relevant context instead of starting from a completely blank slate.

Customize your home page

Your home page can now be customized! You can now add a KPI band with the metrics you care about (fill rate, offers out, tasks due, and more), pick a layout, and arrange the widgets, searches, tasks, interviews, etc. Let us know what other widgets will be helpful for us to support here.

Send follow-ups on nurture campaigns

For nurture email campaigns, you can now keep sending follow-ups even after someone replies. Useful when you're trying to stay top of mind over a longer stretch rather than running one-and-done outreach.

New reporting, search-level and BD forecasting

You can now pull reports at the individual search level as well as BD forecasting by upcoming months to project your business development pipeline

Gmail in the extension

The Stardex extension now works right inside Gmail. You can pull contacts and log activity without leaving your inbox

Quality of Life:

• Drag and drop candidates in list view: Sort your pipeline by “Latest stage first” in the “Stage” column and you can now drag and drop candidates for custom ordering within a stage.

• New External User permission tier, so you can give people outside your firm limited access without handing over a full seat. External users can be set to only have access to notes in searches they are assigned to.

• Edit deal win and loss reasons right from settings.

• Job statuses have lifecycle stage assigned, meaning this can now let you auto archive when it reaches a specific stage.

• AI offer-letter fill: upload an offer letter and we'll pull the details into the offer for you.

• Board cards can be customized now to show / hide additional fields

• More coverage across our API endpoints (scorecards, activities, and more fields on jobs and deals) for teams building on top of Stardex.

• Search got smarter, including partial phone-number and email matching in Cmd+K.

• New integration: Ringover!

We've been running a bunch of customer sessions lately, and one we have lined up for Friday next week (May 22, 11:30a ET) is leveraging Claude Code for custom reports using Stardex data - if you'd like to join, just hit reply and we'll add you to the list.

Here's what shipped in April:

Confidential Searches

If you have a search which needs to stay confidential (board level, internal hires), you can now mark a search as confidential and restrict visibility so only the people working on it can see it.

Client Share with PDF Reports

When you share candidates with a client, you can now pick exactly which sections show up (bio, work history, assessments, notes, etc.) and export the whole thing as a clean PDF. Works for a single candidate or as a full multi-candidate report. Support for more customization of visible candidate data is coming soon to the client sharable links (portal) as well.

Webhooks Support

If you've wanted to wire Stardex into Slack, an internal dashboard, or your own workflow tooling, webhooks are now live on the v1 API. Subscribe to a wide range of events like new candidate, stage change, placement created, and more. Let us know if you would like to see anything

New Chrome Extension + Resume Uploads

We have updated the extension to have a full page sidebar view. This is going to enable us to make the extension way more capable moving forward. For example, you can now upload resumes directly from the extension while sourcing, so you don't have to bounce back to the app.

Team Capacity Board Updates

You can now filter the capacity board by job status, so you're only looking at active engagements without retainer-paused or archived jobs muddying the counts. We also cleaned up some deduplication bugs in the totals.

Internal research agent improvements

We improved some of the default filters available on candidates in the internal research agent, allowing you to hide candidates already in a search, prioritize recently active candidates, and hide previously viewed candidates. Coming soon: the ability to reject candidates as "not a fit" and guide the system to update it's criteria.

Quality of Life

• GDPR compliance suite is live: DSR handling, data packet exports, Article 14 notices, retention policies, and ROPA. Useful if you're working with EU candidates or clients.

• Audit log now includes archived records, so you can see what was archived, by whom, and when, and ability to unarchive.

• Calendar events now show up in the command menu (right panel) so you can jump straight to a meeting.

• Cmd/Ctrl+click now opens jobs, deals, contacts, and companies in a new tab.

• Better Microsoft Calendar support - invites now force-send so attendees actually get them.

• Meeting transcripts captured by the Stardex notetaker now have better timestamp support so you can search through call transcripts more easily.

• Added a reports tab on the search page to view metrics specific to that search without having to jump into the separate reports section.

Last month we expanded our team with Nate who joined as a forward deployed engineer to work closely with our customers to add more automations. We rebranded, and we've loved the reception so far. We've also been running workshops on AI agents for recruiting workflows and planning more of those (next one is on Claude Cowork on Thursday April 9, doesn’t have to be a Stardex customer).

Here's what we shipped in March:

Claude & ChatGPT Improvements

We're seeing a lot of firms start using Claude and Cowork in their day-to-day, and we want to be your Agentic ATS. So we invested heavily this month in improving our API and MCP server to work better with AI agents. If you are actively building workflows on top of your Stardex data, I'd love to hear and see how we can help out in the process.

Placements & Fee Tracking

You can now track placements, retainer installments, commission splits, and fees end-to-end inside Stardex. If you've been managing these in spreadsheets alongside your ATS, this should replace that.

AI Auto-Update in the background

When you log an activity, Stardex now automatically extracts tags and compensation data from it. No more need to click the AI update button, it'll just happen. You can configure which fields get auto-updated and review changes in a detail modal.

Mobile responsiveness

Stardex now works as an app on your phone. We added a mobile-optimized people list, candidate detail view, and command menu. Add the Stardex website to your home screen if you're checking candidates between meetings.

Send to Client

We overhauled the candidate submission flow when sending a single candidate for review. When you're ready to present candidates to a client, the new popup makes it faster to put together a clean submission with resumes. 

Custom Field Mapping for Imports

The bulk importer now supports custom field mapping, stage mapping, and tag behavior config. If you're migrating data or importing a large list, you have full control over how columns map to Stardex fields.

Permissions improvements

Want certain users or external sourcers to not be able to see previous candidate notes and send campaigns? Stardex permissions now supports that!

Stage reached filter

You can now filter candidates by what stages they’ve reached in the past, not just what pipeline stage they’re in currently! Long overdue!

Lists v2: Lists now support templates, cloning, and linking records directly. If your team has a standard format for lists, save it as a template and reuse it. You can also now archive lists to keep your active lists view clean.

Quality of Life:

• Collapsible search bar and new filters: past company, list membership

• Duplicate detection when viewing a person record

• We now extract hyperlinks from resumes (portfolio links, GitHub profiles) that were previously lost in PDF conversion

• Job vector search in Cmd-K so you can find jobs by description, not just title

• Custom job names so you can use your own naming conventions (e.g. searches, roles, projects, whatever you want to call it)

• Zapier triggers for job created, archived, and stage changes

• Activity note drafts auto-save so you don't lose work

• Task reminder emails now show linked people, jobs, and companies

• Custom assessment creator for building your own candidate evaluation forms

A big focus for us this year is helping firms capture the context that usually lives in people’s heads - the decision traces, notes, and search insights that never make it back into the ATS. With that in mind, we took some time in January to launch two of our most requested features - our own notetaker and a calendar integration - which unlocks the ability to automate ATS / CRM updates, and build your own firm knowledge base. 

Stardex Notetaker

Our built-in notetaker records and logs notes directly to the candidate or company profile. You can also define a summary template for it to automatically create a summary in your voice. Your first 14 days are fully refundable, and it is easy to turn on. If you already have a notetaker you love, no worries—we still support integrations with most major notetakers.

Calendar Integration

You can now see all your meetings from your calendar and team calendars directly on activity timelines. No more switching between apps to figure out when the next interview is. You can also schedule an interview from Stardex itself, and attach a resume link to the description. 

Similar Searches

We have added a fourth research agent that shows similar searches when you open up a new deal or job. This is very useful for team members to build context on past searches and establish credibility in pitch meetings, as well as for initial research calibration to find what types of candidates got further along.

CRM Improvements

You can now mark deals as Won or Lost and capture a loss reason directly on the pipeline board. There is also a chart to track time in stage. 

Meeting-Based Automations

This one’s a nice time saver. When a candidate books a meeting, you can automatically stop them from a sequence so they’re not getting outreach emails after they’ve already responded . You can also set up other triggers based on meeting activity to keep your pipeline moving without manual work.

Quality of Life:

• We added next and previous arrows in the candidate detail view to easily jump backwards and forwards through your pipeline while staying in the flow.

• New Zapier triggers for candidate stage changes and custom field values - makes it way easier to automate alerts and sync data with other tools

• Smarter resume ingestion from email attachments - Stardex now automatically extracts contact details from incoming CVs

• Archived pipeline stages so your views stay clean

• Bulk auto tagging when a new custom field is added to jobs

• Expanded campaign stage types for more flexibility in outreach workflows - Supports task types as LinkedIn messages, connection requests, and calls. You can then filter your task list by the task type so you can really quickly knock out all of your LinkedIn connection requests, for example!

• Add CC + attachments in the Stardex email sender: emails sent through Stardex from the candidate profile now support CC and attachments so you can move faster without jumping back to your inbox.

Last year was a big one for us as we grew from 1 to 45 firms. We appreciate each of you trusting us early in our journey especially for a core system to your business. The more time we spend with our customers, the more obvious it’s become that the firms pulling ahead are the ones compounding knowledge over time - leveraging past searches, past candidates, and the best strategies to improve search execution.

A big focus for us this year is tightening that loop: helping you actually correct the AI research agents and log firm context so every new search seamlessly builds on the last. You’ll see us push more in this direction over the coming months.

A few highlights from what we shipped last month:

Autonomous research agents

When you create a new job, Stardex now spins up three research agents automatically - one to find relevant people in your database, one to find candidates externally (limited beta), and one to identify target companies and surface people at those companies . You no longer have to build these queries yourself, Stardex reads your job description and handles it for you. Still in beta, so we're offering a free month of this feature to all current customers on any plan.

Target company sourcing

One of the slow parts of kicking off a search is rebuilding the target universe of companies. Stardex now suggests relevant target companies for each job, with one-click sourcing from those companies based on similar searches and past data.

Custom field reporting

You can now report on any custom field you've created - numbers, drop-downs, dates, whatever. We also added AI suggestions to help surface insights you might have missed + refreshed our reporting page.

Campaign Scheduling

Schedule campaigns to start at a future date and time. You can also toggle weekend sending if that fits your outreach strategy.

Candidate Opt-Out Portal

For GDPR compliance, we've added a branded public page where candidates can unsubscribe or request deletion. You'll see requests in an admin queue to review before taking action.

Resume capture via email

On the move? Forward resumes to your team's unique Stardex email and we'll automatically create or update the candidate profile. See your unique email address in settings.

Quality of Life

• Keyboard shortcuts are more prominent - press "?" anywhere in the app to see all of them

• Faster "Create" menu on the sidebar for quick actions (e.g create a task, log an activity)

• Days to Close now shows on archived jobs so you can see how long each search took

• Richer hover cards on people and companies

• CSV imports directly into lists, jobs, and target companies

Last month we shipped a bunch of AI features, but with a specific angle - we don't think AI should write your emails or make decisions for you. Instead, we built it to handle the tedious parts.

Here's what's new:

1. Email Personalization Variables

We don't think you want AI writing your entire emails (that's how you end up with slop that sounds like everyone else). Instead, our AI helps fill in specific variables to save you time on the repetitive parts. Here's how it works: You write your email template in your own voice, then add variables like {mutual_interest_if_available} or {career_highlight} wherever you need them, and AI will fill it up. You can also provide information on your background (like your work history, hometown, etc) to help identify what's overlapping between you and the candidate. This works for both one-to-one emails and bulk campaigns, and it's fully supported in the Chrome extension too.

2. AI-Suggested Next Steps

After every email, call, or interaction, you don’t need to manually create tasks anymore. Stardex will do that for you. Our AI will analyze your activity notes and meeting transcripts to automatically suggest logical next steps. Just paste your notes from a call (or better if you use a supported note taker). You can turn this on for your whole team in Settings.

3. Auto-Stage Updates Based on Email Replies

We added sentiment detection to email sequences. When a candidate replies saying they're interested or down to chat, Stardex automatically moves them to "Interested" stage. You can customize this with granular stages. You'll also see replies broken down by sentiment in your sequence tracking data.

4. AI Summary Generator

We redesigned this based on feedback. The new version gives you way more control over where summaries get saved - you can keep them as internal note or add them to client-facing views. We've also added formatting options so summaries actually look the way you want them to.

Quality of Life Improvements

• Customize Person view: Since our users spend a lot of their time on Stardex at a candidate profile detail view, we want to give you options to show/hide what you care about most, and reorder things on top. You can do that through Actions on the candidate page
  
  

  

  
  

• RingCentral and Fireflies integrations: We added a Fireflies.ai integration so meeting transcripts automatically flow into Stardex. We also launched RingCentral integration with click-to-call functionality as well as transcriptions automatically feeding back into Stardex.

• Better bulk enrollment workflow with updated user settings for personalization

• You can now create multiple client share links per job, as well as hide candidate details for clients prioritizing unbiased hiring!

  
  

Book a demo today and discover how Stardex AI, an AI-powered tool built with executive search firms in mind can help you find your next superstar hire.

Last month, we focused on building our most requested feature - a home-grown sourcing agent that's already saving our customers hours on search execution. We also shipped some major quality of life improvements that make collaboration with clients smoother.

1. Client Rating on Portals 

Make it dead simple for clients to give feedback. They can now rate candidates with a thumbs up/down or star rating directly in the portal. No more chasing clients for feedback over email - you'll see their ratings instantly in your pipeline view.

2. Public Job Boards

Some of our firms like to maintain a list of active searches for visibility on their website. We've created a simple way to make any job public with one click, then easily integrate that feed with your own website via RSS. No more manually updating your website every time you have a new role - just toggle it public in Stardex and it automatically shows up on your site. You can also enable applicants to apply to it directly, and it will show up in Stardex under a new applicants tab.

3. Filtering for Persons Based on custom company attributes

You can now filter people based on their company's custom fields. Want to find all VPs at Series B companies with 50-200 employees? Or all engineers at companies that raised funding in the last 6 months? Done. This makes targeted sourcing so much faster.

4. Person and Company Deduplication

Finally tackling the duplicate record nightmare! Our deduplication system identifies duplicate people and companies in your database. When merging, you can now pick exactly which fields you want to keep from each record - so you never lose valuable data during cleanup.

5. API Updates

We made extensive updates to our API with a new version so you can build custom reports and create your own workflows on top of your data. Our API now supports AI-powered search - meaning you can query your data in natural language programmatically. We're also cooking up ChatGPT and Claude integrations so you can literally talk to your data through your favorite LLM.

Quality of Life Improvements:

• Improved PDF viewer for documents

• Automatically parse and extract contact details when you upload any document

• Resizable drawer for candidate details plus some UX polish to see information in a cleaner way

• Better filtering across the board with more intuitive controls
  
  

Book a demo today and discover how Stardex AI, an AI-powered tool built with executive search firms in mind can help you find your next superstar hire.

Are you ready to meet our newest AI model?

Last month, we added another engineer on our team, and spent last month improving some visual elements (welcome dark mode), as well as testing out our new home grown AI model - Dex! We're really excited about this one because it tackles one of the biggest time sinks in recruiting: finding similar candidates when you know you've got a good fit.

1. AI Suggestions: Our agent learns from your existing pipeline candidates to find similar profiles automatically. Instead of manually searching through your database wondering "who else is like this person?", Dex analyzes the candidates you've already identified as good fits in your pipeline and surfaces similar profiles within each job. The AI gets smarter as you refine job details, location, and company information. Why this approach? We've found AI is much better at learning from what's already working vs. trying to help you search from scratch.
   
   

   

   
   

2. Similar Profile Matching: Dex analyzes millions of profiles to identify individuals who closely match the current profile you're viewing. This integrates directly into your workflow. When you're reviewing a candidate, you'll see suggestions for similar people worth checking out. We're still testing this feature, so would love to get any early feedback from folks willing to try it out.
   
   

   

   
   

3. Bulk Email Enrichment: You can now use our contact agent to find bulk emails when you're ready to send outreach campaigns. A big time saver for folks who like to send emails in batches of 25-50 at a time. Just select your list and let our agent handle the email lookup instead of doing this one by one.
   
   

   

   
   

4. Premium Company Data + Bulk actions: For customers on our premium company data tier, you can now see in-depth funding history, investors, and headcount growth directly in Stardex without jumping between tools like Crunchbase. We've also added bulk actions on companies, so you can quickly update multiple company records or add them to lists in one go.
   
   

   

   
   

5. Dark Mode + Collapsible Sidebar: Easier on the eyes during those late-night sourcing sessions. We also have a collapsible sidebar now, so you can maximize your screen real estate when you need to focus on candidate details.
   
   

   

Quality of Life Improvements:

• Added a dedicated task calendar view.

• Added explicit "do not contact" lists (perfect for managing candidates who've asked not to be reached or clients with specific restrictions)

• You can now bulk upload CSVs of companies to quickly build your target lists

• Added “interview stage” setting for pipeline stages so you can set any custom stages that you want showing up in Upcoming Interviews

• Our filter system has been updated to exclude candidates who are already assigned to specific jobs (no more accidentally reaching out to someone twice!)

• Added contact data to cmd-k quick search so you can just quickly pull up someone’s profile based on email or phone number

If you're interested in switching to our system, I'd love to show you around.

You can book a demo call here.

What if your recruiting workflow had more speed and reach?

We wanted to share some of our quick updates from last month and good news, we focused on connecting Stardex to external data sources and making search even faster - two areas where we heard you needed more firepower.

1. External Search v0: Find relevant people from anywhere not just from your existing database. When you need someone with very specific experience, our external search scours public sources to surface potential matches you might have missed. This is still in beta, and we know there's a lot of work ahead to improve this! We are giving access to our customers for feedback before we do a public launch.
   
   

2. Quicker AI Search: We already have deep research for complex criteria, but now we also have lightning-fast search that hits your database instantly using AI. Perfect for when you need to rapidly pull together a list like "all product managers at startups that we have interviewed."
   
   

3. Org Charts: Easily see executive org charts right from the company view. Click on any company detail view to see the leadership hierarchy and map out the relationships. Makes it way easier to understand who reports to whom when you're working on exec searches.
   
   

4. Upcoming Interviews: See all upcoming interviews in one centralized view. This helps you stay synced with candidates and never miss important touchpoints - so nothing slips through the cracks.
   
   

5. List Cloning + Visibility Controls: It's been great to see how our customers have been leveraging our lists feature. We're improving it now with the ability to clone lists. You can also make lists public for the whole team or keep them private for confidential searches.

If you're interested in switching to our system, I'd love to show you around.

You can book a demo call here.

Last month we had an influx of new users that led to a lot of growing pains. We had to pull some all-nighters to support the spike of data getting into the system, and appreciate the patience our customers had as we worked through to resolve those issues. We are past that now, and have an enterprise-grade product that can support millions of records!

On top of the performance improvements, wanted to highlight a few of the new features from last month that we added:

• Enhanced Bulk Actions: Improved bulk actions to update custom attributes across multiple candidates at once. Select up to 50+ people and apply tags, ratings, or assignments in seconds—no more clicking through individual profiles. The interface shows exactly how many candidates you're updating before you commit the changes.
  
  

  

  
  

  • Job Live Feed: Easily add notes and see all the recent activities related to a job in one centralized page to act as a hub. You can monitor all candidate interactions in one spot, and add documents to centralize. We'll be adding an AI chat feature here as well to get a pulse check on job progress shortly.
    
    

    

    
    

• Custom Attribute Templates + Team Member Assignment: Easily add columns with options (e.g., a scoring system for candidates) that our AI can use to auto-tag. You can also create a custom attribute of type "team member" to assign people directly to candidates or jobs. We've added pre-built templates like Yes/No, Status, Priority, Location Preference, Colors, and Rating to make setup even faster—no more starting from scratch every time!
  
  

  

  
  

• Passthrough Rate Chart: View passthrough rates with complete control over the calculations. We've designed it so you can customize whether skipped stages count in the calculation or not, plus get a nice visualization through a Sankey diagram that shows exactly where candidates are moving (or getting stuck) in your pipeline. Perfect for spotting bottlenecks with your clients
  
  

  

  
  

• Keyboard Shortcuts: We're adding lots of keyboard shortcuts to make the app lightning-fast to use. "R" on a candidate profile will open up the resume, "C" lets you compose an email, "A" creates an activity, and more coming! These shortcuts work across the platform—whether you're in table view, Kanban, or individual profiles.

If you're interested in switching to our system, I'd love to show you around.

You can book a demo call here.

From major signings to exciting pilots, it’s been a whirlwind.

Here’s a quick look at the new features we rolled out last month:

1. Improved contact finder agent: Finding accurate email addresses is tough because no single provider has complete coverage. That's why we've improved our finder agent to now query 6 different contact providers realtime to get you the best personal and work email matches. We're seeing impressive results: 85%+ match rate for personal emails and 90%+ for work emails!

   
   

2. AI Search agent 2.0: We've revamped our AI search capabilities based on feedback. The search now automatically fills out relevant filters and suggests criteria that the agent should deep research each candidate with. For customers on our Pro tier, our agent can also pull relevant funding/revenue data and headcount growth metrics, helping you dig deeper into identifying the right candidates on top of your data.
   
   

   

   
   

3. Bulk Import: This has been at the top of our roadmap, and we wanted to do it right! All you need is a CSV file. Our AI takes care of field mapping automatically, and we can also enrich the profiles with full LinkedIn work history. No more tedious manual data entry or complex import processes.
   
   

   

   
   

4. Date of last engagement: We know how frustrating it is to lose track of when you last connected with important contacts. That's why we built our "Date of Last Engagement" feature that automatically updates based on specific activities (or if LinkedIn message sync is enabled). This makes it simple to track both relevant candidates and clients you need to reach out to, ensuring no important relationship falls through the cracks.
   
   

   

   
   

5. AI powered Resume parsing agent - You can easily add a new candidate to Stardex by uploading their resume, and Stardex automatically fills out their work history, education and contact details! The profile will be linked to their previous companies and indexed for search later.

If you are interested in switching to our system, I’d love to show you around.

You can book a demo call here.

It’s been a big month at Stardex—we got our dream domain, launched a new site, and shipped updates you’ve been asking for.

Here’s a look at the new features we added last month:

Lists: No need to put everything under a single job. Whether you’re brainstorming a list of “best healthcare CPOs” or “companies with outstanding design culture,” you can now create flexible lists for anything you like. Custom fields are supported here.

Bulk Actions: You can now quickly add multiple people to a job or fire off a bulk email campaign in just a few clicks. You can also bulk update status! Great for saving time when you’re managing a high volume of potential candidates or clients.

Deal Reporting: From the Deals page, you can directly see the size of your pipeline, track revenue potential, and keep tabs on every stage with fewer clicks. Visibility = better decision-making.

Improved People Search: In addition to our AI-powered search, you can filter by keywords (we look through transcripts, notes, and more), past jobs, companies, location, and more. Finding the right people is now even faster.

Email Gating on Client Portals + Candidate Assessment: Based on feedback from our last update, you can now easily add an email gate to client portals for extra privacy. Plus, you can leave and view candidate assessments right on the client portal.

Feel free to book a time on our calendar if you’d like to see a quick demo. We'd love to show you around.

We’ve been rolling out lots of new practical features based on feedback, and we are excited to share this month’s highlights:

1. White-labeled Client Portals: We’ve added private, sharable links for your clients—no more clunky Google Sheets or cumbersome portals! The best part? Clients don’t need to remember passwords (let’s be real, that’s a hassle no one wants). You can customize exactly what to show—like stages, custom fields or notes—under your own logo / branding. They get a private link that syncs with your data, making collaboration seamless. Example here.
   
   

   

   
   

2. Email Campaigns: We’ve automated setting variables (including in the subject line) for personalized outreach! Use the Chrome extension to enroll candidates with pre-filled variables for name, company, etc in one click. We’ve added better tracking for opens and clicks, plus an easy way to pause sequences if you want (though by default it will stop if someone replies)
   
   

   

   
   

3. Organize your candidates around target companies: If you run your searches by mapping out a list of target companies, this feature will be a timesaver. Simply input the relevant companies (e.g., Slack, Meta, Salesforce), and as you add candidates, it auto-syncs. You can easily track which companies need more attention to find additional candidates, and also identify which companies you should target based on past experience. No more manual updates—just set it and let it work.
   
   

   

   
   

4. Tasks: Add follow-up tasks directly when leaving notes, not just for candidates but also for clients and deals (works on Chrome extension as well). Upcoming tasks will appear on the homepage, and we’ve kept the to-do list simple to avoid any overwhelm. It’s a simple, practical way to keep everything on track to ensure nothing slips through.
   
   

   

   
   
   

5. Reports: You can slice and dice your data by recruiter, job, or custom date range. Quickly see how many candidates moved through each pipeline stage, along with a breakdown of every activity performed. It’s way easier to track progress and spot bottlenecks now.
   
   

   

   
   

6. Kanban view: Our most requested feature! If you prefer a more visual layout, you’ll love the new Kanban view for your candidate / jobs / deals pipeline. Of course, you can still switch back to the table view—whatever works best for you. Easy to switch on top right of each table.
   
   

   

Feel free to book a time on my calendar if you’d like to see a quick demo. 

Ever wished your recruiting tools just worked better together?

Good news!

We’ve finally rolled out way better search, email engagement, an easy-to-use CRM and a company research tool. Each of these features is built from the ground up to support AI workflows and help your firm move faster.

• Smarter Candidate Search on your database with AI

  Now, instead of just searching by keywords, you can ask questions like “Who were the Ops candidates I interviewed who currently work at a startup?” and get relevant candidates from your database right away. Stardex looks through work experiences, call transcripts, notes, and documents to bring up the most relevant folks.
  
  

  

  
  

• Email Campaign Outreach

  A big request was the ability to plan follow-ups in one go. Now, you can schedule multi-step emails, and reminders (including a prompt to message someone on LinkedIn), plus track open/click rates if you’d like. We’re going to be building in AI personalization into our campaigns as well with user feeback!
  
  

  

  
  

• Manage Clients and Contacts with our CRM

  We’ve introduced simple ways to handle all your client relationships, create deals, and set tasks so nothing slips through the cracks. You can even easily create potential clients and leads right from the Stardex Chrome extension!
  
  

  

  
  

• Easy Company Research

  Tap into a database of 30 million companies to quickly find businesses based on what they do—no more guesswork. This bit is experimental, so we are looking for more folks to give us feedback.
  
  

  

  
  

• Connect with 10+ note takers.

  Automatically connect Stardex with your favorite note-taking / transcriptions and productivity tools so everything stays up to date. Most ATS don’t do a good job at integrating, and we’re fixing that. Our customers are automatically integrating notes from Metaview, Fireflies, and more.

Feel free to book a time on our calendar if you’d like to see a quick demo.

New year, new name, new features!

We’re beyond excited to share several major updates—including our new name. Wharf is now Stardex (find us at stardex.ai)—we chose this name to evoke a flexible, modern “rolodex” that helps recruiters easily find star talent.

Our goal is to build a modern ATS + CRM that firms need, combining the simplicity of tools like Notion with the power of AI and automation. We’ve been working hard on features you’ve asked for - here’s a quick quick rundown:

• LinkedIn Message Sync: We're pretty sure we're the only ATS + CRM that automatically syncs your LinkedIn messages. Thanks to our redesigned chrome extension. As long as someone is in your database, and you’re viewing the message thread in LinkedIn, every exchange will be automatically synced if you want. That means no more searching through your personal inbox—your team can simply check the shared profile for full conversation history.
  
  

  

  
  

• One-Click Candidate Summaries: Tired of copying and pasting into ChatGPT? Our AI instantly generates candidate summaries with just one click. Plus, you can fully customize the template with your own instructions and examples, ensuring the summaries fit your specific needs.
  
  

  

  
  

• Email Lookup and Sending: We've integrated with couple email providers so you can find contact details and send emails directly from Stardex (Gmail and outlook supported). If your provider of choice isn’t supported yet, just bring your API key and we’ll set it up for you.
  
  

  

  
  
  

• Enhanced Company View: Click on any company in your database to see a detailed view, including a list of employees at that company. This helps you quickly assess your coverage and see relevant connections in one spot.
  
  

  

  
  

• Searchable Document Uploads: All uploaded documents are indexed for effortless searching
  
  

• Easy Exporting: If you need to share data outside of Stardex or run some quick analysis, we’ve built one-click export to CSV, along with an option to copy data into Google Sheets as a table. No more wrestling with complex exports or tricky formatting.
  
  

  

  
  

What's Coming Soon:

• Email Sequencing: built-in campaigns that help you automate follow-ups

• Better CRM Support & BD Features: more streamlined business development workflow

• Enhanced Client Views: share customizable candidate lists with clients

• Zapier Integration: automatically sync notes and data with popular note-taking and productivity tools

We’re excited about these updates and believe they’ll significantly enhance recruiting workflows.

Book a time on my calendar if you'd like to see a live demo!

We are excited to launch Stardex—an autonomous ATS + CRM for recruiting firms built for the age of AI. We have built the most flexible, simple platform with AI workflows in every corner of the product—one that feels as intuitive as tools like Notion, but with the powerful capabilities of semantic search, LinkedIn Recruiter integration, and workflow automation.

How did we get here?

Last year, we launched a Chrome extension to solve our own problem of researching relevant customers to target while building Dots. The solution was similar to OpenAI’s operator feature, taking a list of instructions and automating long-running tasks using LLMs. Our product was geared towards early sales teams, but surprisingly we saw more recruiters playing with our extension for sourcing on linkedin. This led us to focus on the research aspect of recruiting—for instance, how recruiting associates spend hours each week meticulously reviewing applicant profiles against specific criteria. We decided to target search firms (focused on senior hires), as they’re willing to invest in quality solutions.

We asked what you needed most—and built exactly that.

Our vision is to create the most flexible yet simple ATS for recruiting firms—one that feels as intuitive as tools like Notion while offering powerful capabilities like AI-powered candidate search, LinkedIn Recruiter integration, and workflow automation. Drawing from our conversations with over 50 firms this year, we’ve rethought what an ideal ATS should be from the ground up. We’ve been piloting the product with a few firms and are now ready to bring on more customers!

Some of the key features we recently added:

1. Flexible table view for all your data - Firms told us that they need a system that adapts to their unique workflows. We researched best-in-class products to create an experience that balances flexibility with necessary guardrails. Start with a simple setup and add custom fields as needed. We hope to allow you to capture exactly the information you require for each search, enhancing productivity without adding complexity.
   
   

   

   
   

2. One-Click Chrome Extension - it shouldn’t take 5 clicks to add a candidate from Linkedin. We keep it simple with just one click. You will see your most recent active jobs on top of Linkedin, and with one click, all relevant data is instantly synced. We take care of managing company records under the hood, so you can breeze through sourcing. (Contact data integration is also coming soon!)
   
   

   

   
   
   

3. Search across all your people data extremely fast - Every firm we spoke to mentioned lack of searchability as a major pain. We are using a state of the art search engine to instantly search through all your candidate data, including tags, work experience, notes and more. We’re going to improve this further with AI-powered semantic search so that you locate the perfect candidate even if they don’t exactly match your search terms. You’ll be able to search things like “VP of sales from Dallas that mentioned having a golden retriever”
   
   

   

   
   

4. Auto tagging to save you time - Manually tagging profiles can be time-consuming and inconsistent. Well, we have AI to help us here. Our AI automatically tags profiles when they're added from LinkedIn. You can also create custom fields (e.g., “Startup Experience”), and our AI will auto-tag profiles accordingly. This ensures automated, consistent tagging across your team and makes future searches more effective.
   
   

   

   
   

What’s on our immediate roadmap:

• Clean, customizable client view: you’ll easily be able to select which columns and candidates you want to share with your clients

• Email Lookup and Sending Emails: we’re integrating with contact providers so you can easily grab contact details and start reaching out to candidates

• Enhanced AI powered semantic search: search with natural language to find that one person that’s on the tip of your tongue
  
  Book a time on my calendar if you'd like to see a live demo!