The ALEX Desktop is a cool tool for rock star recruiters. It's available by invitation only. The Invited can invite others. So who do you know?

If you don't know anyone using it, then join the club. We mean that literally, actually. You can become one of the Invited in one of two ways. You can either request to join our LinkedIn Group called The Recruiter Training Center. Or you can become a registered recruiting member of the Recruiter Network on TalentTrader.net. Both are free.

Talk about a killer app. Want to turn your email system into an ATS (applicant tracking system) for mobile recruiting? Interested in accessing your candidates from your Blackberry or iPhone with nothing more than what your PC and mobile device were born with?

ALEX Desktop takes resumes confined in email attachments and makes them completely searchable Microsoft Outlook contacts (vcards) with one click. Search on anything in the resume and you'll find the matching contacts. Sync up your mobile device with Outlook and you're good to go! We mean that. Go anywhere and still have your database at your fingertips.
The arduous days of hunting and pecking though user-defined folders of emails that contain attached resumes are over. Tons of recruiters are using Outlook for candidate contact management even if they have an ATS. That's because many ATS's still don't have an easy way to get resumes in email attachments into the database. If that sounds like you, then power-up Outlook with ALEX Desktop and finally do something productive with all those attached resumes - like placing them on open jobs.
Check out the demo.

Once you've turned those email attachments into Outlook contacts (vCards), go to your Contacts folder. In Outlook's top right-hand corner you'll see a search field in the Navigation bar. Enter anything that was contained in the resume there. The ALEX Desktop populates the contact fields (e.g. name, address, phone, email etc.) and puts the full text resume in the Comments field. Outlook enables you to search on all these areas.

Starting January 2010, ALEX Desktop will have a base monthly cost of $19.95.

Absolutely. In fact having one set of keys per company makes on-demand refueling easier. To learn about on-demand refueling read FAQ #4

ALEX Desktop is not a management system. We don't store any data. We only turn your resumes into Microsoft Outlook contact records. You can, however, use Outlook to create Shared Contact Folders. If your company uses a Microsoft Exchange Server environment then these Shared Contact Folders can be created. You should contact your system administrator to set this up.

Blackberry and iPhone (and even Gmail) are all compatible with Outlook. Simply sync up your mobile device with Outlook per the instructions that came with your device and your Outlook Contacts (vCards) will be accessible to you from your mobile device.

ALEX Desktop can process resumes/CVs written in English from pretty much any geographic area. In addition to English the ALEX Desktop 'speaks' French, French Canadian, Dutch, German, Spanish, Italian, Swedish, Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, Czech and Polish. When recruiters start asking us to process Pig Latin, we'll do that too.

ALEX Desktop works with Microsoft Outlook 2007 or 2003 on the Microsoft Vista and Windows XP platforms. The ALEX Desktop works with standard Outlook email configurations for POP3, Exchange or IMAP (for more information on IMAP read #11 below).

Windows Vista and later versions of Windows XP come with the .Net Framework 3.5 installed. This is good as this is a system requirement for the ALEX Desktop. If you are running an older version of Windows XP and haven't gotten the latest updates from Microsoft in a while, you might not have the .Net Framework 3.5 installed. You will need to install it first before installing ALEX Desktop. ALEX Desktop automatically checks for the .Net Framework 3.5 upon installation, and if it is not found on your computer you will be prompted to install this component from Microsoft. It's a good idea to go to Microsoft's website and check for the latest system updates - like the .Net Framework 3.5. Once these updates are installed you will probably be prompted to reboot. After that you can install ALEX Desktop which should take just a few seconds to a minute or two tops. For more information visit the ALEX Desktop Documentation.

If you downloaded ALEX Desktop but it's not working it's probably because you need to register it. To register, go here. After your registration is complete we will email you the keys you need.

You probably have your Outlook configured for IMAP and to only download the headers in the emails, not the full emails themselves. This means that technically the attachments aren't there for ALEX Desktop to find. You can easily fix this by changing a setting in your Outlook to download the full emails (not just the headers). We have step by step instructions on how to do this. You can find them in our ALEX Desktop Documentation.