What does it really mean for an ATS+CRM to be AI-native?
Jan 13, 2025
What does it actually mean for a platform to be AI-native? There’s lots of products out there bolting-on AI to jump on the hype train, but we think most are over-promising and under delivering. We’re building Stardex, the AI-native platform for recruiting firms, so we’ve got thoughts on this! In our opinion, there’s three key elements to it, including one you may not have thought of.
First, we believe that you should be able to chat with your data at every logical grouping level in your product. In our case at Stardex, we have candidates in various job pipelines, each pipeline falling under a client. You can ask AI to summarize data at any three of the levels. For example:
who are the candidates interviewing at any jobs at Ramp this week?
how many years of experience do all the rejected candidates have for this job?
Summarize this candidate according to my client report template
By contrast, take LinkedIn Recruiter, which has a similar concept of candidates in projects. You can use AI to structure your global candidate filters, but that’s about it. You can’t use AI on the project level at all, because this product isn’t AI-native.
Next, search on the platform should actually be passing each piece of data to an AI model for evaluation, rather than just pulling up similar results. To continue picking on LinkedIn Recruiter, if you use the AI search with several distinct criteria, it’ll just populate the existing search filters automatically. For example, if I searched “Partner at a search firm”, Recruiter will populate the job title and industry. This is somewhat helpful, but it isn’t exhaustive by any means and your criteria aren’t actually evaluated on each profile. You’ll see lots of folks that are partners at consulting firms, but worked as a recruiter earlier in their career. At Stardex, we would actually feed each similar search result through an AI model rather than relying on similarity. This allows AI to reason much more robustly on detailed criteria.

LI Recruiter just populates your filters for you - not AI native!

Stardex evaluates all relevant results against your criteria using AI models - that's AI native :)
Finally, we believe that truly AI-native platforms should be using AI to “glue your data together” and eliminate manual data cleaning work. You see this a lot with integrations to pre-AI platforms: integrations feed data in to the platform, but inevitably break because someone’s name or email is wrong by one character. “John Smith” may put his name in as “Johnathan Smith” and your interview summary doesn’t go where you want it to go. At Stardex, if we don’t find an exact match for integration data, we evaluate your recently actioned candidates to find the best possible fit so you don’t have to manually copy-paste or fix data.
At the end of the day, software should work for you, not the other way around. That’s why we believe AI truly shines not in the flashy demo videos and search bars, but in the details. At Stardex, that’s where we’re focused on answering your questions and eliminating your busy-work.