Recruiting has spent the last decade getting very good at search. The honest truth is that finding people was rarely the hard part. The hard part was everything around it: reading a role closely enough to know who to look for, screening a long list down to a credible short one, and getting a thoughtful message out before someone else did.

That surrounding work is exactly what agentic AI is built to take on. Instead of handing you a longer list of results, an agentic system understands the role, does the legwork across sourcing, screening, and outreach, and brings you decisions to make rather than tasks to grind through.

Over the past year, that is what we have been building toward at SeekOut. Scan our release notes and you will see a steady march from December 2025 through June 2026: a redesigned Workspaces experience, an in-app activity feed, AI interviewing, a one-step way to launch a search, and the ability to recruit from inside the AI assistant you already use. Together they add up to a platform that works alongside you.

Here is the tour.

What “agentic” actually means for recruiters

The word gets thrown around, so it is worth being concrete. An agentic workflow does three things. It understands intent, meaning it reads the role and knows what a strong candidate looks like. It takes action across steps, moving from sourcing to screening to outreach instead of stopping at a search box. And it keeps a human in control, surfacing recommendations you approve rather than acting behind your back.

This is not autopilot that replaces the recruiter. It is closer to a capable teammate who handles the repetitive middle of the funnel and hands you the judgment calls. The features below are each a piece of that.

The bottleneck was never finding people. It was everything around it.

Recruit from your favorite AI assistant

The most novel addition this year is SeekOut MCP, which lets you search and recruit straight from the AI assistant you already work in, including Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot. Ask for the talent you need in plain language, and SeekOut does the searching.

It is not a thin wrapper. SeekOut MCP can search across seven talent verticals, including Public profiles, GitHub, Academic, Healthcare, Nursing, your ATS, and Internal Talent, plus a unified search across all of them in a single query. It ships with fourteen guided, skill-based workflows that cover talent search, outreach drafting, competitive intelligence, diversity insights, and market analysis. You can create a Workspace and save candidates without leaving the assistant, search your hiring pipeline by stage, requisition, and status, and every search returns a clickable link that opens the results in the SeekOut UI when you want the full interface.

The point is simple: recruiting now happens where you already think and work, not in a separate tab you have to remember to open.

Screening that runs itself

Screening is the most time-consuming and least scalable step in hiring, which is why Sam, AI Interviewing is one of the most meaningful additions of the year. Sam runs structured, rubric-based interviews asynchronously, then hands back clean, comparable results so you can evaluate candidates side by side.

You define what good looks like once, and Sam handles the rest: no scheduling, no manual note-taking, and a consistent rubric applied to every candidate, which helps reduce the noise and inconsistency that creep into manual screens. Sam is integrated directly into SeekOut Recruit, and it can also run as a standalone product if interviewing is the piece you need most.

From job description to shortlist

Workspaces is the guided heart of the platform. It walks you from a job description to a ranked, evaluated shortlist step by step, with scorecards to assess candidates and shortlists you can build in minutes. This year we made it dramatically faster to start.

With Workspace Express, creating a search is a single step. Paste or upload a job description, let AI identify the key criteria, review and edit what it found, then click Apply to run the search. From there, AI Recommendations bulk-evaluates profiles and surfaces the strongest matches automatically, you can submit profiles for evaluation in bulk from the toolbar, and you can filter evaluated profiles by score to focus on the best fits. SeekOut even emails you when recommendations are ready or when a colleague shares a Workspace, so momentum does not stall while you are heads-down elsewhere.

Sharper signal, less noise

Good sourcing is as much about what you hide as what you surface. A run of updates this year focused on cutting noise so the best candidates are easier to see.

• People Insights everywhere. Skills, diversity, and market views are now available across GitHub, Expert, Healthcare, and Internal Talent searches, not just Public profiles, and the visualizations were upgraded to clearer bar and pie charts.
• Hide Profiles. Filter out candidates you have already shortlisted, exported, or marked as not a fit, with configurable timeframes. An advanced mode lets you filter by Workspace, project, who took the action, status, and date range.
• Smarter outreach. Run multiple custom campaigns within a single Workspace for different role variants, build bespoke sequences per candidate, and let admins standardize sequence email-domain settings across the org.
• Faster collaboration. Shared comments are visible across all Workspace views, status updates can be applied in bulk, and an email indicator on shortlist cards lets you copy a candidate’s email with one click.

Built for every kind of hire

All of this sits on top of SeekOut’s breadth. One platform spans tech and GitHub talent, healthcare and nursing, experts and academia, internal mobility, and cleared candidates, and it can rediscover the talent already sitting in your ATS. The underlying data kept refreshing through the year too, with updates to the Expert talent pool, the Nursing index, and the GitHub index, so the people you find reflect where talent actually is today.

Try it yourself, free

The best way to understand an agentic workflow is to run one. SeekOut is now available as a self-serve free trial with no sales call required, and you can start a monthly or annual subscription on your own when you are ready. You can be up and running in minutes.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is agentic AI in recruiting?

Agentic AI in recruiting uses AI that understands a role, takes action across sourcing, screening, and outreach, and surfaces recommendations a recruiter approves. Unlike simple automation, it handles the repetitive middle of the funnel while keeping a human in control of decisions.

Can I use SeekOut inside ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or Copilot?

Yes. SeekOut MCP lets you search and recruit straight from the AI assistant you already use, including Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot. It searches across seven talent verticals, runs guided recruiting workflows, and returns a clickable link to open the results in the SeekOut UI.

What is SeekOut Sam?

Sam is SeekOut’s AI interviewer. It runs structured, rubric-based interviews asynchronously and returns clean, comparable results so you can evaluate candidates side by side. Sam is built into SeekOut Recruit and can also run as a standalone product.

How does SeekOut Workspace Express work?

Workspace Express turns a job description into a ranked shortlist in one step. You paste or upload a JD, AI identifies the key criteria, you review and edit, then click Apply to run the search. AI Recommendations then surfaces the strongest matches automatically.

Does SeekOut offer a free trial?

Yes. SeekOut is available as a self-serve free trial with no sales call required, and you can start a monthly or annual subscription on your own. Start at seekout.com/free-trial.