Key Takeaways from SeekOut’s AI & Product Innovation Event

The SeekOut team recently hosted our first-ever AI & Product Innovation Event to showcase the work we’ve been doing and what’s possible with ongoing advancements in AI. If you missed the live viewing, you can now watch the event on demand.

Here are the key takeaways:

• SeekOut added generative AI into our products earlier this year with SeekOut Assist, and we’re excited that customers are now able to be much more effective. As we look to the future, SeekOut is looking at all aspects of the sourcing and recruiting cycle and using AI to help make recruiters more effective.

• Pipeline Insights is equipping HR leaders with key insights they need to drive talent strategy across the business today. Looking forward, HR leaders will have the tools to be even more strategic, bringing simulations and insights that are even more pivotal to forging company strategy.

• SeekOut Grow is enabling companies to retain top talent today by providing relevant career paths and next steps to internal employees. As data proliferates, we believe that each employee will have their own AI-enabled career coach, matching individuals to the jobs, mentors, and skills that are most relevant to them

• Responsible AI is our responsibility. Our guiding principles are not just words on a paper—we live and abide by them daily. First and foremost, SeekOut is human-centered and AI-assisted. In all our development, the user is in the driver’s seat.

Now let’s take a deeper look at how these themes came to life throughout the event.

Building human-driven, AI-assisted technology

Co-founder and CEO Anoop Gupta gave everyone a warm welcome and then handed it over to Claire Fang, Chief Product Officer, who provided an overview of SeekOut’s philosophy and approach to developing products with AI.

With the explosive leaps in generative AI this past year, there are tons of ideas about how to apply AI in the talent space. They generally fall into three categories, across all of which SeekOut is innovating:

• Content creation—for example, AI can write a poem, an email, or a job description.

• Knowledge comprehension—AI can understand talent skills or job requirements from unstructured data.

• Knowledge creation—AI can make personalized career recommendations or suggest actions to improve your recruiting funnel.

At SeekOut, we're very cautious about the potential risks of AI and have developed responsible AI principles that guide our work. The first and most important is to “build human-driven, AI-assisted technology.” We believe AI should expand and elevate people’s intelligence, not replace it. Because of this, we sometimes make hard decisions to not automate certain workflows in order to keep the decision-making power with the human user.

Elevating your recruiting game with AI

John Tippett, Head of Product for SeekOut Recruit, showed us the speed and power of AI to find and engage top talent with a personalized message in minutes. SeekOut Assist, recently named a Top HR Product of 2023 by HR Executive, translates your job description into a powerful search with relevant titles, required and preferred skills.

Next, it helps you engage talent by creating a highly personalized draft outreach message for each candidate, factoring in details from the candidate’s SeekOut profile and your job description. Of course, being human-driven, AI-assisted, you can control and edit the search, and the tone, length, and focus area of the message. These capabilities are available with SeekOut Assist today.

Finally, John gave us a glimpse at future-looking capabilities of Assist. By simply typing “What's the talent pool for compliance analysts in Boston?” you can get insight into where candidates work, what kinds of titles they have, what representation looks like, and more. Refining the search is as simple as typing a follow-up question—for example, “Who have worked at our top competitors,” or “Show me current employees who match.” At the time of the event, these capabilities are not yet available.

Creating dynamic business partnership with data and AI-powered insights

Next up, Angela Sze, Director of Product for Insights, showed us how SeekOut is empowering recruiters, TA leaders, and HR leaders to drive talent strategy across the business with Pipeline Insights.

Without extensive expertise and data analysis, many TA leaders struggle to connect the many data points with what actions would move the needle—especially as those decisions often require buy-in from their business partners. So we built Pipeline Insights to help you improve recruiting efficiency and diversity, to deliver superior and consistent candidate experience, and to strengthen your business partnerships.

Pipeline Insights shares actionable data via three key views:

• The funnel view breaks down your recruiting pipeline by key pivots like department, recruiter, and source, with an overlay of diversity representation at each stage.

• The recruiter view helps you understand how to improve your pipeline, looking across the velocity of how candidates are moving through the pipeline, the conversion of candidates stage over stage, and the diversity of the slate presented to the interview team. 

• The TA leader view puts the most important metrics at your fingertips—like offer acceptance rates and time-to-fill—helping you stay on top of the team’s pipeline and any lagging reqs.

These capabilities are available with Pipeline Insights today.

Switching gears to look at what’s possible, Angela showed us a world where leaders from across the business and talent functions work in tight collaboration to ensure an agile workforce that evolves with external and internal market forces. This means benchmarking your skills against competitors, and understanding through simulations what it would look like to close a skill gap. 

Using real data to highlight software engineers in automotive organizations, Angela showed us how AI-powered insights could walk you through a build-versus-buy analysis to close the gap. Across redeployment analysis, upskill analysis, and a hiring plan, Angela demonstrated how these simulations will empower HR leaders to bring the expertise and backing data to plan a more agile workforce with a sustainable competitive edge. At the time of the event, these capabilities are not yet available.

Retaining top talent with AI-powered career coaching

In our final product demo, Anil Dhawan, VP of Product for SeekOut Grow, showed us SeekOut’s powerful internal talent marketplace, Career Compass. With AI, it creates a custom profile for each employee, pre-populating it with data from your internal systems and public data. This means employees and managers start off with a rich and inviting experience on day one—no need to fill out giant forms.

Anil showed how Career Compass suggests all kinds of development opportunities, including projects and gigs, and connections with other people who may share similar career paths. With SeekOut Grow, people have the information and personalized tools they need to explore how to develop their career within your organization, rather than outside it. These capabilities are available with Career Compass today.

Anil then pivoted us toward the future, where every employee has a personalized AI career coach guiding them. The assistant highlights relevant roles for you to explore in detail, explaining why you may be a good fit and guiding you on next steps to prepare for the role. This includes suggesting learning opportunities, jobs, and even stretch assignments—all with an easy-to-use, conversational interface. At the time of the event, these capabilities are not yet available.

Embracing AI to advance systemic HR

Global Analyst and Thought Leader Josh Bersin joined us to speak about the transformational shift from the information age to the intelligence age that’s happening in our post-industrial economy. He urged that HR must evolve to an integrated, consulting-oriented group (“systemic HR”) in order to address the multidisciplinary people problems that businesses face today. Key to this evolution is AI, which unlocks the ability to see data in new, aggregated ways. 

Josh called out the advantages of “second-generation AI systems”—solutions like SeekOut, that were built from the ground up with AI—which can understand complex connections between vast amounts of unstructured data from varying sources. These solutions empower skills analysis, sourcing, recruiting, talent matching, succession management, talent marketplace, career planning, and more “in an extraordinarily more powerful way.”

Watch the full recording to see more

Check out the on-demand recording to see live demonstrations of current and future-looking AI capabilities from SeekOut and to hear Josh Bersin’s thoughts on the evolution of the HR function with AI. 

If you don’t have 52 minutes to watch the full event, use these timestamps to find what you’re most interested in:

• 00:27 Welcome with Anoop Gupta, Co-founder and CEO

• 01:41 Responsible AI with Claire Fang, Chief Product Officer

• 07:26 SeekOut Recruit with John Tippett, VP of Product

• 16:26 Pipeline Insights with Angela Sze, Director of Product

• 28:32 SeekOut Grow with Anil Dhawan, VP of Product

• 36:08 Future of HR with Josh Bersin, Global Analyst & Thought Leader

Finally, we’d like to thank all of you who were able to join and engage with us during this event. Your partnership motivates us every day to continue innovating and help great people and companies grow together—we couldn’t do it without you!