a photograph of a modern office space with exposed beams and a row of glass windows, with people in business casual clothing conversing in the workplace as they walk down a spacious hallway

TA at SeekOut: What We've Learned as Customer Zero

One of the perks of being on SeekOut’s talent acquisition (TA) team is access to our own product portfolio. Our team utilizes SeekOut Recruit’s External Sourcing, Talent Rediscovery, and Applicant Review, plus SeekOut Grow to proactively build diverse talent pipelines, surface high-caliber passive talent, efficiently move candidates into the interview process, and identify opportunities for TA team members to add value to other areas of the business.

SeekOut’s typical talent pool is a mix of direct applicants, sourced candidates, employee referrals, and internal applicants. With the SeekOut platform, we’ve hired passive talent to critical functions across the business:

  • Engineering, including software development and project management roles

  • Sales, including selling and enablement roles

  • Marketing, including product marketing and content marketing roles

Internally, we layer SeekOut tools throughout our workflow. Our teams start with inbound candidates in Applicant Review, then check prior applicants through Talent Rediscovery, and lastly, identify passive talent through External Sourcing. Based on bandwidth, we may divide these steps between a recruiter and sourcer, or the sourcer can run all three tools for the search. And we build our candidate interview pools without leaving the SeekOut platform.   

Through using our own products, we’ve decreased agency spend, increased diversity across our talent pools, and optimized multiple steps along the talent acquisition journey. Here are a few of the ways we leverage our tools and some key lessons learned over the past year as SeekOut’s customer zero. 

Applicant Review brings the most qualified candidates to the top of the list

Applicant Review enables our TA team to identify top applicants and quickly move them into the interview process. We can efficiently and fairly sort applicants based on how strongly their qualifications match the required and preferred skills and other criteria for the role.  

We believe it’s important that humans remain in the decision-making seat, so our artificial intelligence and machine learning systems never make employment decisions. 

Talent Rediscovery improves candidate experience and decreases time to fill

Talent Rediscovery helps companies deliver on the promise to utilize prior candidate applications for future roles. Imagine how great it feels for a candidate to learn that a company they previously expressed interest in has a new role that might be a great match for them.  

SeekOut opened a director-level role and utilized Talent Rediscovery to find qualified candidates already in our applicant tracking system (ATS). SeekOut’s seamless integration with our ATS allowed us to search with the same user experience we are accustomed to in SeekOut Recruit, with 60+ Power Filters and Boolean search at our disposal.  

SeekOut returned several candidates with the required skills and experience for the role, and as an added bonus, we already had the candidates’ resumes and preferred contact information in the system. Closing this role in 38 days, we decreased our average time-to-fill by 50%!  

We jumpstart stagnant searches with External Sourcing 

SeekOut Recruit’s External Sourcing shortened time-to-fill for an in-demand product marketing role. The role was posted for 90 days without much traction and the hiring manager was eager to add a great candidate to the team.  

We assigned the role to a dedicated sourcer, who leveraged External Sourcing to identify passive candidates with experience in the HR technology space. Once we started sourcing, the role moved to late-stage interviews within 21 days.  

Based on our last five searches, we expect one new candidate to enter the interview process for every five passive candidates we engage through SeekOut. The impact of sourcing also extends beyond passive candidate hires. Even if a sourced candidate doesn’t receive a job offer, we’ve found their addition to the interview process enhances the talent pool and gives managers confidence in making hiring decisions. 

Goodbye Boolean builder spreadsheets, hello SeekOut diversity tags

Boolean builders are one of the most common ways to identify diverse candidates through a LinkedIn search, but they are quite limiting when building a representative pool of diverse talent.  

For example, a Boolean builder can help compile a list of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs) to return Black and Latinx talent, but not all Black or Latinx talent attend HBCUs or HSIs. In contrast, SeekOut uses a large number of attributes found on candidate profiles—including names, educational history, group membership, terms used on their profile, and others—to deduce the diversity status of each candidate. 

SeekOut’s current precision and recall is above 90%, meaning our classifiers are very accurate when finding candidates for each diversity category. 

SeekOut’s Diversity Filters (e.g., Women, Hispanic or Latinx, Black or African America, Asian, and Veteran) enable every sourcer and recruiter to lead with diversity and build diverse talent pools at the beginning of every search. 

Access to SeekOut’s diversity classifiers drastically reduces the time it takes SeekOut’s recruiters, sourcers, and hiring managers to find highly aligned, diverse talent for our open positions.

SeekOut Grow projects increase collaboration across teams 

Members of our talent acquisition team have unique strengths and interests that translate well to other areas of our business. With SeekOut Grow, our recruiters and sourcers take on short-term assignments in other departments based on their areas of interest and skillsets.  

Since launching SeekOut Grow internally, our TA team has hosted projects to share our talent acquisition process and workflows with other parts of the business. Our recruiters also participate in projects for others, adding value to the content marketing, product, and sales development teams.

Our TA team is more efficient without sacrificing quality

While most TA teams are challenged to do more with less, our team leverages SeekOut’s full product portfolio to maximize efficiency and output. SeekOut’s External Sourcing, Talent Rediscovery, and Applicant Review products enable our TA team to curate a diverse talent pool and hire people faster without sacrificing a great candidate experience. By implementing SeekOut Grow, we’ve invested in employee growth and a long-term internal mobility strategy.  

Not yet using SeekOut? Find out how to boost your recruiting team’s efficiency with these and other great tools—request a demo today. 

You may also like

Diverse executive roundtable with seven or eight senior-level professionals sat at a meeting table having an interactive workshop
BLOG

How to Get Started with Skills: An Executive Workshop with Josh Bersin

Read the blog post →
Two people sitting down and reading books
BLOG

15 Books HR Leaders Know You’ll Love in 2024

Read the blog post →
Illustration of two graphical interfaces with arrows pointing to one another to demonstrate an integration between SeekOut and another HR tool like an applicant tracking system
BLOG

4 Greatest Advantages of Integrating Your Recruiting Tech Stack

Read the blog post →

Request a demo

Ready to take your talent optimization strategy to the next level? Request a demo to learn how SeekOut can help you recruit hard-to-find and diverse talent.

Request a demo
Illustration of person reading with abstract shapes flying above