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06
May
Diversity Recruiting  ·  Recruiting Best Practices  ·  SeekOut
The Joy of the Search: How to Support Diversity Recruiting

With diversity recruiting at the top of the priority list for many companies, those involved with talent acquisition are continually looking for new ways to discover diverse candidates. But there’s more to finding diverse candidates than searching LinkedIn. 

Think about how you buy airline tickets. Back in the day, people typically went to a given airline’s website that offered the route they needed. Now, search engines and aggregators (like KAYAK & Travelocity) make it possible to see all the airlines flying to your destination, plus their schedules and pricing. You’ve got options and the ability to filter through the results. 

SeekOut takes a similar approach to diversity sourcing. LinkedIn is like that airline you always went to before the advent of sites like KAYAK and Travelocity. Just because it originated the professional network doesn’t make them the best way to access and unpack information about potential candidates. 

Likewise, if you’re keen to ensure diverse recruiting, you shouldn’t need to go to the same spot over and over again. I talk about different ways to promote diversity in the workplace on a recent episode of Sourcing School with Brian Fink and Ryan Leary.  

Here are my top six tips for discovering diverse candidates:   

  1. Establish who is responsible for diversity

Diversity means way more than hiring people who look different from one another. And yet, many organizations get stuck on this foundational aspect. 

Many things need to happen to move the needle on diversity, and one of the first steps an organization should take is determining who is responsible. 

Is it HR? The leadership team? Who is going to do the work and speak for the outcomes? Know your role first. 

  1. Leverage recruiting adjacent resources

There are plenty of great recruiting-related resources – this is one of them. Going to my point above, looking in the same place will yield the same results. 

One of my favorite books to give recruiters (and one that Fink also knows and loves) is The Joy of Search: A Google Insides Guide to Going Beyond the Basics. 

Is it about recruiting? Not really. Is it about being a great online searcher? 100 percent. And that’s what great recruiters are – great online searchers. 

  1. Look beyond the obvious

We need to challenge ourselves to think beyond what we know and how it shapes our worldview. This runs the gamut from the obvious to the not-so-obvious, like preferring candidates who went to Ivy League universities or California colleges because that reminds us of where we’re from and who we relate to. 

With SeekOut’s Blind Hiring Mode, you can focus your sourcing on experience and skills by hiding information that would reveal a candidate’s gender, race, or ethnicity so recruiters and hiring managers can minimize unintended bias. 

  1. Practice mindful sourcing

Mindfulness underpins so much of this conversation – especially as we put searches into action. That means reviewing keyword selection, incorporating gender-neutral or otherwise non-biased language. 

When it comes to finding diverse candidates, every word matters down to the letter. You need to not only look for diverse populations, but you also need to think like them. Our language is evolving and recruiting needs to too. 

  1. Pay extra attention during review

As you start to engage diverse candidates, pause and think about how you interact. The raised focus on diversity and inclusion might mean you make additional attempts to connect, even with active job seekers. 

You will likely need to adjust your outreach by working to understand this talent pool and demonstrating patience, persistence, and politeness. Respect the value they offer. 

  1. Data doesn’t lie

While it’s true that recruiting is about making connections, it’s also important to understand how and where you’re most effective in these efforts. 

Data can be a powerful ally, and SeekOut’s Diversity Talent Analytics will help set targets, drive conversations with hiring managers so you can create diversity-friendly job descriptions and hone your sourcing strategy. 

The overlay of technology works to ensure you’re on the right track and making progress with the candidates you’re looking to engage. 

In Closing 

With diversity recruiting, there are a few critical factors to keep in mind: sourcing goes beyond filters, bias comes from all directions, and headcount is just the start. 

Long-term change doesn’t happen overnight. You will make mistakes. 

You will probably even repeat some of them. It’s a process, one that benefits from thoughtfulness and intention – and thinking outside of the proverbial box as much as possible. 

Learn how SeekOut can help you recruit hard-to-find and diverse talent. Request a demo.

 

SeekOut Media Contact:
Eric Jaquith
Senior Account Executive
[email protected]


06
May
Recruiting Best Practices  ·  SeekOut
You Can’t Close If They Don’t Open: How to Up Response Rates

In a world where nearly everything has become quantifiable, it can be difficult to determine which metrics matter most. But when it comes to the top of the recruiting funnel, response rates reign supreme. And for one simple reason: you can’t close if they don’t open. 

Sure, getting a prospect to respond is the first in a series of steps, but any possibility of a relationship is done if they don’t. Not responding is a response. It’s a deliberate decision not to engage. And so, response rates work as a measure of effectiveness. 

Recently, I sat down with Ryan Leary, CMO at Recruitingdaily.com and Brian Fink, Senior Technical Recruiter at Rentpath to discuss response rates and how to move the needle. You can listen to it below: 

Truth be told, early in my career, my rates were low, hovering around 13 percent, but over time, through trial and error, I learned what works and now boast a 68 percent response rate. Brian, acknowledging that his rates are somewhere in the 30 percent range, asked for tips so others might learn. 

A Fact-Finding Mission 

My story starts in a familiar place, sending out detailed messages to potential candidates, giving them background on who I am, the company I work for, the job opening, and more. 

But despite all the time I spent crafting these messages, the rate of response wasn’t great, and I grew frustrated. Using that irritation to my advantage, I decided to go a proven route and turned to AI-powered email personalization with SeekOut. 

More like, “Hi, I’m Jackye, a recruiter at Y company. I am very impressed with your skillset and wanted to talk to you about X job. Are you interested in learning more?” 

Pretty quickly, I saw a pattern emerge as I ramped up these communications and tracked my campaign results within SeekOut. According to data provided by the software, it was clear responses went up when I kept my messages more personalized and asked for permission. My current method relies on this approach, and it’s a theme I carry through each interaction. 

The reason I ask for permission is that prospective candidates aren’t always excited to hear from recruiters. That type of thinking is assumptive. It’s a common mindset and one that recruiters likely need to move away from. 

Instead of presenting as all-knowing, I use curiosity to get the conversation going. That means including a few basics and a call to action, one that asks for permission to follow up. Doing this helps establish credibility and introduce trust, a critical factor for today’s job seekers, particularly those actively employed. 

My goal is to get to them to take the next step and track what’s working along the way so I can always improve my response rates and build a robust talent pool for the role I’m hiring for. 

Once contact is made, and a response is received, SeekOut automatically removes the candidate from the campaign, so I don’t have to do that manually. I save time on admin tasks and devote more time to creating a thoughtful response.  

The second message should explain the why. This is where I take a step back and offer up pertinent information about the job in question. It’s where I explain that I have a position in mind and am working to find the right person. 

Again, I ask their permission before getting presumptive about their intent. 

Additional Ideas 

Building on this format, I have found success with a few additional tactics. SeekOut‘s intuitive AI-powered talent intelligence platform includes suggestions for subject lines, the best time to send, and information from candidates’ unified profiles. 

Use these if and when you see fit: 

  1. Everything should be a separate email until they answer

Rather than “circle back” or look to passive-aggressive cliches like “Per my last email,” I keep each email separate until there’s a reply. An email rarely gets lost. 

By sticking to the same thread, I might wind up reminding my prospect why they didn’t engage in the first place. Whereas when I reach out with a new message, I might find they’re in a different place now, one where they don’t even remember my earlier attempt. 

But instead of assuming a candidate never saw it, I can prove they haven’t opened my emails because SeekOut tracks my outreach so I can validate my strategy with data.  

  1. Set a correspondence day

For me, correspondence day is Thursdays. I dedicate this day to doing outreach, follow-up, next steps, and updates, and by earmarking one day a week, there’s never an excuse for not getting this part of the job done. 

It creates a precedent and adds structure to my process so everyone involved knows when they will hear back (if there’s something to share). 

  1. Leverage the OOO

This is a personal favorite because I see out-of-the-office and auto-responder emails as intel, especially when they include vacation information and, hopefully, a return by date. 

Once the person gets back in the office, I send an email inquiring about the trip, knowing that they’re easing back into their routine and will likely be excited to talk about their experience. 

Closing Thoughts 

Ultimately, I’ve found that we need to move away from the expectation that prospects are sitting around waiting for your email. 

Instead, it’s up to recruiters to stay curious, be empathetic, leverage actionable data from solutions like SeekOut, and work to understand potential candidates rather than try and make them understand you. 

It’s in a shift in perspective, cadence, and nuanced messaging that the magic happens – and rates go up. Ready to improve your candidate response rate? Request a demo of SeekOut.

SeekOut Media Contact:
Jackye Clayton
Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Strategist
[email protected] 


03
May
SeekOut Product Updates
SeekOut Messaging Update

Improvements to increase candidate response rates

We’re excited to announce a redesign of our messaging features to make your outreach to candidates more effective. Read on for more details. 

Support for multi-channel sequences 

You’ll have the best candidate response rates when you reach out multiple times over different channels (email, phone, LinkedIn, etc.). SeekOut now supports creating steps of different types to manage these multi-channel campaigns. When you add a step to a campaign, you have your choice of an automated custom email or using a pre-created email template. You can also add manual steps reminding you to call, text, send an InMail, or connect on LinkedIn.

When it’s time for a manual step, a new task will appear on your Messaging To-Do list. Once you’ve completed the task, check it off and SeekOut will move on to the next step.

More control over message timing

You can now specify the interval between steps in hours as well as  days. This can be helpful if you want to follow send a follow up email shortly after sending a LinkedIn connect request, for instance.

You can also choose which days of the week messages should not be sent. Many recruiters find messages on Saturdays have low response rates, for instance, so you may want to uncheck Saturday.

Edit form fields and preview messages for a specific candidate

We know you want your automated messages to be as natural sounding as possible. Sometimes that means using a different version of the candidate’s name or other field. You can now edit any of the candidate fields by clicking on the candidate’s name.

If you want to see how a message will look for a candidate prior to sending, you can preview any step for a specific candidate.

More efficient use of templates

SeekOut Messaging lets you create templates so it’s easy to reuse steps in multiple campaigns. You can use the same final message in all your multistep campaigns, for instance. Templates are also useful for SeekOut customers who send Quick Messages instead of creating automated campaigns. 

With this update, it’s easier to create, edit, and find templates. The newly revamped Templates section shows you all your available templates and also lets you search for them. 

When you want to use a template in a multistep campaign, just choose Template as the step type.

Improving the Basics

If you’re new to messaging with SeekOut, we’ve improved the setup process. It’s simpler to get started with message campaigns or templates.  

And more!

There are many more improvements to SeekOut Messaging, including tips for creating the best outreach sequences, a more consistent UX, and a simpler campaign creation flow. Try it out and please let us know what you think.

Engagingly yours,

Team SeekOut

P.S. If you’ve already been using SeekOut Messaging, all your campaigns will continue to work as before. You don’t need to make any changes.

This update is live on Premium, Premium Tech, and Expert licenses.


29
Apr
Certifications
Level Up Your D&I Expertise With SeekOut’s Data-driven Diversity-Certification

“If we have data, let’s go with that. If all we have are opinions, let’s go with mine.”

– Jim Barksdale, former Netscape CEO

Diversity is an important and urgent issue for our times, and we’re glad to see it getting the attention it deserves. Company leaders should strive to set realistic, achievable goals that motivate their teams. We believe data can help you and your team think more strategically about how to approach diversity hiring and see success. When you’re using data, you are taking out the guesswork and using straight facts that will help you create and execute an effective strategy. Then you can create real world recruiting scenarios that truly move the needle on diversity and inclusion.

SeekOut’s new Data-Driven Diversity Certification aims to help address some of the challenges found in diversity recruiting, and help practitioners get the right data and make real change. Developed by SeekOut subject-matter experts, this certification prepares talent acquisition professionals with competence in assessing, sourcing, recruiting, and retaining diverse talent.

Franny Oxford, VP of Organizational Development and Culture at BlueSprig shares, “I did this diversity recruiting course and it was great! Thorough, thoughtful, and full of actionable next steps.”

Here’s what you need to know about the certification:

Who is this certification course for?

SeekOut’s Data-driven Diversity Recruiting Certification is for anyone who wants to learn how to level up their D&I discipline with data, including:

  • HR professionals
  • Talent Acquisition professionals
  • Recruiters
  • Sourcers

Whether you’re new to diversity recruiting, or a seasoned professional, you will learn how to level up your strategy with data.

What will this certification course cover?

In this certification course, Jackye Clayton, Diversity Equity and Inclusion Strategist at SeekOut, will share how you can get started with data-driven diversity recruiting. It goes beyond theory, to include actionable steps to find and engage diverse talent, and get better results.

There are five chapters, each focusing on a different aspect of data-driven diversity recruiting:

  1. Grounding the Data Driven Diversity Conversation explains why diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) are top priorities at many organizations, and why data has a place in DEI.
  2. Data is Your Diversity Recruiting Ally discusses why data is important and how you can use it effectively in your diversity recruiting strategy.
  3. Leveraging Data to Inform Diversity Targets explores how to use data to understand the talent landscape and set realistic goals.
  4. Diversity and Job Descriptions shares how to rethink your job description and search parameters to build a more qualified, diverse talent pool.
  5. Candidate Outreach Best Practices reviews things you can do to get higher candidate response rates, so you can engage and hire more candidates from underrepresented groups.

You will also learn how you can use SeekOut to build a stronger diversity, equity, and inclusion practice. You will be granted a free, 3-day trial to go into SeekOut and try things for yourself.

At the end of the course, you should be able to implement diversity recruitment best practices that help you identify the best talent, become a strategic advisor to your hiring managers, and achieve your diversity targets.

How long will it take to complete this certification course?

This certification course will take about an hour to complete. Each chapter has:

  • 2-3 short videos, which range between 1 and 6 minutes long.
  • A short quiz and brief assignment to certify your expertise.

You may complete the entire course at once, do each section on-demand as your schedule allows, or even watch one short video at a time. It’s up to you!

How much does this certification course cost?

There is no cost to attend this course or earn the certification. We want to help more practitioners learn how to supercharge their diversity recruiting efforts with data, so they can build stronger, more diverse teams.

How can I apply my learnings from this certification course?

As part of the data-driven diversity certification program, we’re offering a free, 3-day trial of SeekOut. You can use SeekOut to:

  • See what your company diversity looks like today.
  • Understand how many diverse candidates have left your company recently.
  • Explore how many diverse candidates are available for your open roles.
  • Research which cities or schools to focus your recruiting efforts on.

SeekOut can help you find the right data, make sure diversity recurring goals match reality, and become a talent advisor to your organization.

How do I sign up for the certification course?

If you’re ready to implement a more effective diversity recruiting strategy by utilizing data, head over to SeekOut University and sign up to become a certified diversity expert. Enrollment is free and you will be granted instant access to the course.

Following the course, you will be emailed your data-driven diversity recruiting certificate and LinkedIn profile badge to demonstrate your mastery of this important topic.

Become a SeekOut certified data-driven diversity expert today.

Enroll Now


14
Apr
Diversity Recruiting  ·  Recruiting Best Practices
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Mistakes That Are Holding You Back

Imagine it’s pre-COVID. You’re going to a conference, but you’re running late. You find a parking spot, jog into a building you’ve never been to before, and you see a janitor cleaning up. You stop to ask where the front of the meeting hall is, and you’re directed to a nearby hallway on the left. As you head that direction, you see a couple taking wedding photos in front of a beautiful fountain. You enter the meeting hall and get there just in time to see that the keynote speaker from one of the hottest tech startups just took the stage.

Close your eyes, and try to visualize this scenario.

What do you see? Was the janitor a white woman? Were the newlyweds two men? Was the keynote speaker a 40-something bald Black woman?

This is what Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion expert Jackye Clayton asked attendees at her HR Tech keynote to demonstrate implicit bias. We all have a tendency to visualize what’s familiar, but this is holding us back from building diverse workforces and inclusive company cultures that will retain them.

If we want to make progress toward diversity, equity, and inclusion, we need to challenge the way we think, and the way we do things. With that, here are six common mistakes that may be holding you back.

1. Only sourcing Black candidates from HBCUs

Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) are a tremendous resource for sourcing Black candidates, but should not be the only source.

Out of the top 10 colleges and universities for enrollment of Black and African American students, only three are HBCUs. Based on current enrollment, you would be leaving over 50,000 candidates on the table if your recruiting plan for Black talent stops at HBCUs. In fact, only 20 percent of Black students who complete a bachelor’s degree go to an HBCU.

Make sure your diversity recruiting strategy is able to reach the other 80 percent of Black college graduates—as well as those without a college degree.

2. Using unnecessary job requirements to screen candidates

Job requirements often contain a minimum amount of experience with continuous responsibility or growing leadership responsibilities. Candidates with job gaps or lack of career progression are often disqualified right away.

This can disproportionately affect people from marginalized groups, who are more likely to be treated poorly at work—and may have shorter tenures as a result. For instance, 90 percent of transgendered workers have directly experienced harassment or mistreatment at work. This includes inappropriate questions, missed promotions, and physical violence. Because of this, people from marginalized groups could be more likely to have job gaps or lack of career progression—and shouldn’t be punished for it.

Before you judge someone because they seem to move around a lot, consider that they may be a victim of discrimination.

3. Overlooking candidates with disabilities

Companies often think about diversity in terms of gender and race, but overlook other forms of diversity—including disability.

Approximately 11 percent of all postsecondary undergraduates report having some form of disability. And there are many educational institutions that specifically assist students with disabilities:

  • Gallaudet University supports students that are deaf or hard of hearing.
  • Landmark College supports students with learning disabilities.
  • Perkins School for the Blind supports students with blindness, deaf blindness, and multiple disabilities.
  • The University of Houston has a center for students with disabilities that supports mobility impairment, psychological disabilities, and learning disabilities.
  • The University of Minnesota Institute on Community Integration supports those with developmental disabilities.

When you are recruiting, don’t overlook the often overlooked.

4. Only hiring for diversity in entry-level roles

True diversity and inclusion isn’t an easy fix, like hiring young women out of college to join your sales team. It requires change across your entire organization.

Make sure that you have diverse leaders on your team to hold others accountable to the company’s diversity goals and create a safe environment. If one of your new team members from an underrepresented group feels discriminated against, your program isn’t going to work. Accountability is critical.

5. Expecting technology to solve a problem that a lack of technology did not create

Innovations in modern technology have made finding diverse talent easier than ever before. With an AI-powered Talent 360 platform like SeekOut, you can find the right talent, engage with them through automated, personalized messages, and boost the candidate experience at every stage of the hiring process.

But technology alone cannot solve all your diversity and inclusion challenges—because it’s not causing them. For instance, technology alone can’t reduce biases. That’s because bias doesn’t start when organizations buy technology. The problem starts when you hire people who are unaware of their own biases. While technology may be able to help with things like blind resume reviews, that won’t matter once your team members meet candidates and new hires face-to-face.

6. Retaining team members who contribute to a toxic culture

Some people are so afraid of losing their power and their comfort that they would rather not take action to create a more diverse, inclusive workplace. Allowing those people to stay at your organization is holding you back from reaching your goals, because it creates a toxic work culture.

If you want to employ a diverse workforce, you need to break or change your culture to help those people feel that they belong. You may have practices and policies in place that have disadvantaged people for years, and it’s going to take hard work, self-reflection, and some discomfort to change them. You may need to shatter the way you are used to doing things, and you may need to let people go if they are holding you back.

Final thoughts

The world has changed in the past 20 years, but many of us are recruiting based on information we received 20 years ago. We have so much more technology and ways to connect with people than ever before, yet we haven’t learned how to connect with people just across the street that are different than us. It’s time we challenge what we think we know, and how we do things.

Next time you recruit for an open role, do an exercise to visualize the different types of people you’d like to see on your team. When you encounter the unexpected, ask yourself how you would handle the interaction if the person looked like you, and whether your behavior would be different if they did. And make a conscious effort to expose yourself, your family, and your friends to as many different kinds of people as you can.

Hire those that don’t fit your culture. Vote for candidates who have earned the position. Challenge the norms. When you change the expected to the unexpected you can have long-lasting consequences that make companies and communities change for the better. It’s time to level-up on diversity, equity, and inclusion.

 

Ready to build a more talented, diverse team? Get a demo to see how SeekOut provides you the needed diversity talent insights to get a competitive edge in recruiting hard-to-find and diverse talent.

SeekOut is the #1 rated diversity recruiting software on G2 Crowd.


17
Feb
SeekOut Product Updates
February 2021 Product Update

Millions More Candidates

At SeekOut, we’re constantly expanding and updating our database of candidates so you can efficiently find the talent you need. Read on to learn about our latest updates.

More Profiles = Better Search 

We’ve added over 140 million new profiles, including: 

  • Over 128 million new candidates in our Public Profile database cover all industries and roles 
  • Over 4 million additional software engineers who are working on GitHub, where we’ve analyzed their work, including rating their abilities with the SeekOut Coder Score 
  • Over 7 million experts ranked by their in-depth knowledge demonstrated by their patents and research 

You’ll see improved results across the board in SeekOut, especially for the most hard-to-find candidates. Let’s break down the numbers! 

  • 20% more African-American candidates 
  • 38% more female candidates based in the U.S. 
  • 58% more candidates with a security clearance (wow!) 
  • 28% more candidates returned for in-demand roles (such as UX designer) using Power Filters 

In addition to the increased number of candidates, we’ve updated the engine, which updates, matches, and de-duplicates the profiles in our database. Hence, candidate information is enhanced. 

This update is live on Premium, Premium Tech, and Expert licenses. 

Expert Improvements 

Find Prominent Contributors 

For companies searching for deeply technical experts, SeekOut Expert search uncovers millions of candidates who can’t be found elsewhere by mining papers, patents, and publications. These kinds of works typically have multiple authors – the average is five – but not all authors contributed equally. The authors are listed, starting with the author who contributed the most to the work. Being a first author is a big deal.  

The last author listed often is an advisor or supervisor of the project. For this reason, you can glean an understanding of a candidate’s experience from the order of authors.  

To support this, we have added a new Prominence filter that gives you the ability to filter by candidates who have been the first or last author on a paper or patent. You will find that filter under View All Filters in SeekOut Expert search. 

Select Has been first author to see Expert candidates who contributed the most to a publication. Select Has been last author to show candidates who are likely to have been special advisors or supervisors on a publication. 

Expert Overview At-A-Glance 

Some details on Expert profiles have been rearranged to make it quicker and easier to see contributions from the candidate. 

This update is live on Expert licenses. 

Open Search Across North America 

The United States and North America (Non-U.S.) locations have been combined into North America. Previously, if you were looking for candidates in and out of the United States, you had to perform two searches: one for the US and another country. 

To search for candidates in the US and other countries in North America at the same time, choose North America as your location and check the box next to each country you want to search for. 

This update is live on Premium, Premium Tech, and Expert licenses. 

Customize Tags & Statuses across your organization 

Admins can now manage tags and statuses across their organization.  

Click on your initials and select Team Administrator, then click on the Org Settings tab. Tags and statuses can be added, edited, and deleted from this page. To see more information about this feature, see our support center article titled Tags and Statuses. 

This update is live on Premium, Premium Tech, and Expert licenses.


10
Feb
SeekOut  ·  SeekOut Company Updates
Elissa Fink, former CMO Tableau, Joins SeekOut Advisory Board

February 10, 2021, 8:00 am PST

Redmond, WA – SeekOut today announced the addition of Elissa Fink, former CMO of Tableau, to its Advisory Board. SeekOut, a Seattle-based high-growth startup, is an AI-Powered talent platform that helps enterprises recruit hard-to-find and diverse talent.

“We are very excited to welcome Elissa Fink to our Advisory Board” said Anoop Gupta, CEO and Co-Founder at SeekOut. “Elissa joined Tableau as marketing leader when their revenue was a mere $5M. She helped scale their revenue 200-fold to $1B+ by the time she left. SeekOut is experiencing a similar hockey stick growth. We are thrilled to have Elissa as an advisor and benefit from her experience as we scale our go-to-market strategy. Elissa is hands-on, she brims with energy, she inspires, and we’ll be the lucky beneficiaries of her learnings from the scars and bruises and successes she has experienced.”

Elissa currently serves on a wide variety of corporate boards, including Talend (NASDAQ:TLND), Qumulo, Pantheon, Intellimize, Conversica, and Uberflip, as well as not-for-profit boards Salmon-Safe and Operation Fistula. She advises fast-growth tech companies in scaling and marketing strategy and also teaches at the University of Washington in both the Foster School of Business and the School of Communications. Elissa’s 11+ years of experience as Chief Marketing Officer at Tableau Software’s, was instrumental in taking the company from a small startup to a publicly held industry leader with over $1 billion in revenue.

“SeekOut is transforming the way companies discover, analyze and engage untapped talent. We all know that finding the right mix of people to work on teams drives companies’ success. But so much of the processes around talent are either broken, sub-optimized or inefficient especially when it comes to diversity and inclusion. I am inspired by how SeekOut is creating huge value – and not only for companies but also for employees. Plus, to have the chance to work with Anoop, his execs, the SeekOut team and the amazing Board was a huge attraction” says Elissa.

This short video conversation between Fink and Gupta highlights SeekOut’s vision of building a better working world that embraces diversity, inclusion, and equity. The SeekOut website contains resources designed to help companies and teams recruit hard-to-find talent and boldly champion D&I efforts and make tangible progress in achieving hiring goals.

About SeekOut

With best-in-class technology and breakthrough innovation, SeekOut pushes the boundaries of what’s possible with talent discovery, analytics, and engagement. SeekOut’s trusted AI-powered talent search engine enables Talent Acquisition teams to understand any talent pool and quickly find and engage the talent they need — with a focus on diversity, technical expertise, and other hard-to-find skillsets. SeekOut was founded in 2017 by top executives and engineers from Microsoft and is trusted today by leading brands across industries.

SeekOut is headquartered in Redmond, WA. We are driven by a mission to provide customers with an AI-Powered platform for enterprise talent optimization, ensuring each employee and hire contributes maximally to company growth and personal growth. For more information, visit www.seekout.io

SeekOut Media Contact:

Sapna Maniar

Director of Marketing

[email protected]


15
Dec
SeekOut Product Updates
Autumn 2020 Product Updates

The SeekOut team has been hard at work throughout the fall listening to your suggestions and building new capabilities. Please read on to learn what’s new!

SeekOut Dark Mode

Many of us are spending more time than ever this year on computer or TV screens, which can be hard on the eyes. You may now toggle on Dark Mode to suit your lighting conditions and personal preference.

Give it a try by clicking your initials in the top-right corner and toggling Dark Mode on!

 

AND/OR Diversity Filters

Each new hire has the ability to shift the dynamics of your team, so it’s important to be intentional about diversity when building your talent pipeline.

When selecting two or more Diversity filters, you now have the ability to find candidates whose profiles contain all selected diversity tags or candidates whose profiles contain at least one of the selected diversity tag.

For example, you can search for candidates who are both Female AND Veteran, meaning female candidates who have served in the military: 

Here is an example of an OR search; SeekOut will look for candidates who are either Hispanic OR Black or African American:

This update is live on Premium, Premium Tech, and Expert licenses.

More controls to prevent unconscious bias

We’ve added the ability to redact more information when searching for candidates or sharing projects. You can now hide education details, links to social profiles, and salary information — and enforce those redactions when sharing with a hiring manager.

This update is live on Premium, Premium Tech, and Expert licenses.

Simplified new user license creation

Team administrators already have the ability to create new users, reassign licenses, and run usage reports. But until now, you needed help from your Customer Success Manager to ensure that your new users received their activation links.

Now, SeekOut automatically emails your new users with their personal activation links. However, if you would like to send something more personal (perhaps you want to point them to internal training resources), you can copy the activation link and paste it into a personalized email:
 
 
 
 
If you aren’t a Team Administrator yet, and you’d like to be set up as an Administrator for your organization, please contact your Customer Success Manager or send an email to [email protected]. 
 
 

 

 

Discover candidates with startup experience

Many of our customers want to find candidates who have experience working at startups. Our new Startups Power Filters let you target candidates who are at startups now or have worked at a startup in the past. You’ll find these under the Lists of Companies section in Power Filters.

This update is live on Premium, Premium Tech, and Expert licenses.

Send emails when candidates are most likely to respond

Our new Candidate Messaging enhancement now supports schedule-sending campaigns at a Specific Time based on your time zone and the Best Time according to the candidates’ time zones. This may be the difference between a candidate seeing and responding to your email, or your message getting lost in a candidate’s inbox.

Attach files in your Messaging campaigns

You asked so we built it: SeekOut now supports file attachments in messaging campaigns. You can now attach job descriptions or recent press mentions. We support all attachment types, but we recommend sticking with .pdf, .gif, .jpg, or .png files to ensure that your messages don’t trigger spam filters or anti-virus checkers.

Rediscover “warm” candidates in Taleo

Rediscover and reconnect with “warm” candidates who have already applied for a role at your company. In addition to our previous integrations with Greenhouse, SmartRecruiters, and Beamery, we now support candidate rediscovery within Taleo.

Connect with your account executive to learn more about ATS Rediscovery or request a live demo here.

Integrate multiple ATS/CRMs with SeekOut

If your organization uses an ATS to keep your recruiting pipeline organized and a CRM for candidate outreach, you can now integrate with both at the same time.

Check out our full list of supported integrations here.

Integrations are available by request. Please connect with your Customer Success Manager or send an email to [email protected]. 

Even more candidates

The SeekOut index continues to grow. We now have over 446 million candidates in our public profile database.

Until next time

We hope these changes make your sourcing and recruiting easier and more enjoyable. As always, we’re appreciative of your partnership, so please don’t hesitate to let us know how we can continue to improve SeekOut to make you more successful.


14
Dec
Diversity Recruiting  ·  Recruiting Best Practices  ·  SeekOut
Data-driven Diversity: 4 Ways Your Team Can Start 2021 on the Right Path

Diversity and inclusion are top of mind for many company leaders today. It’s the right thing to do to combat social injustice, and research has shown that diverse teams perform better overall. But finding more diverse candidates to interview is one of the biggest barriers to improving diversity.

Data can help. In fact, 81 percent of attendees on a recent webinar agreed it would be helpful to have diversity statistics for setting and achieving goals. However, 91 percent said they had difficulty finding the statistics they needed.

The right data can help you and your team think more strategically about how to approach diversity hiring in 2021.

1. Setting realistic diversity targets

It’s common for HR leaders to be given corporate diversity targets, but they may not always be realistic. Taking a more proactive approach with data can help you get a seat at the table while goals are being discussed and set.

Understand your talent pool demographics by looking at your competitors’ demographic data, as well as regional demographic data. Compare that to your own data to find opportunities to improve. For example, if 3 percent of your workforce is comprised of Black employees, but 10 percent of your regional population are Black, consider how you might better attract and retain Black workers.

Break down demographic data by seniority, discipline, and specific roles to find exactly where you should focus your diversity recruitment efforts. For example, if your competitor and regional data show a higher percentage of Black software engineers than you have on your team, you will know you have a strong opportunity to hire more talent from that group.

2. Strategically advising hiring managers to craft better job requirements

A Hewlett Packard internal report found that men apply for a job when they meet 60 percent of the qualifications, but women apply only if they meet 100 percent of them. Your hiring managers may be inadvertently derailing your diversity recruiting efforts with long lists of must-have skills and qualifications.

Empower your talent acquisition team to have data-driven conversations around job requirements, so they can become true strategic advisors to your hiring managers. For example, they can show how the original job requirements yielded only 50 candidates across the country, with only a handful from underrepresented groups. By removing unnecessary skill, location, or title requirements, they can show hiring managers how to access a larger, more diverse talent pool.

3. Strategically sourcing and submitting diverse slates

Traditionally, sourcers have uncovered candidates from underrepresented groups by building Boolean strings based on where diverse people are. But many of these strings aren’t accurate—and may even introduce bias. For example, searching the top 100 US female names finds less than 20 percent of women, and those women will be predominately white. A quarter of Historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) students aren’t Black, and only 9 percent of Black college students attend HBCUs.

Dig into your data to see where candidates from underrepresented groups are coming from, and use that to refine your sourcing strategy. For instance, what companies have they worked for, where are they located, and what colleges did they attend? Help your team go beyond traditionally-used search strings by investing in sourcing platforms that use data and AI to accurately find candidates from underrepresented groups, and reduce bias.

And when hiring managers submit slates to hiring managers, encourage them to include at least two women and two minorities. Studies have shown that a more diverse slate of candidates increases the probability of hiring someone from an underrepresented group.

4. Diagnosing bottlenecks in the talent funnel

Finally, use data to uncover breakdowns in your talent funnel. Is there a stage where candidates from underrepresented groups are disproportionately screened out of your hiring process? Is your turnover rate higher for employees from underrepresented groups?

Diagnosing pitfalls in your talent funnel can guide you toward solutions. For example, blind resume reviews can reduce bias early in the process, while structured interviews and assessments can reduce bias later on.

But simply hiring a candidate from an underrepresented group doesn’t help you build a more diverse workforce if you can’t retain them. Keep a pulse on why employees are leaving, so you can provide more transparency in the hiring process—or move to enact change.

Final thoughts on data-driven diversity

There is a great opportunity for your team to leverage data and insights to set diversity targets, become talent advisors to your hiring managers, and achieve or exceed your targets. But increasing representation at the top of your talent funnel is only part of the equation.

Candidates from underrepresented groups should feel included, and know that their different personal experiences and ways of thinking are accepted and celebrated. Diversity, inclusion, and belonging are all very important, and need to be thought about concurrently to achieve true progress and better outcomes.

Ready to build a more talented, diverse team? Get a demo to see how SeekOut provides you the needed diversity talent insights to get a competitive edge in recruiting hard-to-find and diverse talent.

SeekOut is the #1 rated diversity recruiting software on G2 Crowd.

 

Jen Dewar, SeekOut Content Writer


13
Sep
SeekOut Product Updates
Introducing a More Efficient & Powerful SeekOut

For leading enterprises and recruiting teams of all sizes, SeekOut is the go-to tool to fill the top of their talent funnel. Today, we’re releasing a more efficient, more powerful experience for our users.

There’s a lot in this update, including:

  • Better use of screen real estate and more readable profiles

  • Candidate Cloning & improved AI Matching

  • More customization options to make SeekOut fit the way you work

  • New, consistent navigation across the site

  • A new dashboard that makes it simple to continue what you were doing or start something new

  • Even faster searching

Jump right in to the new SeekOut or read on for more details.

More Efficient

A key goal of this update is to make our users more efficient. This starts with the basics, including switching to a compact, easy-to-skim font called Rubik. The navigation bar is now on the left side to better use the horizontal screen space and leave more space for the candidate data and insights.

We’ve made the overall user experience more consistent. Whether it’s switching between candidate lists and insights or navigating pop-up windows, there are fewer concepts to learn.

Beyond the visual appearance, every search returns results faster in the new UX compared to the old one. And you can start a search from anywhere with the unified search box at the top of every page.

To help you understand candidate expectations without leaving SeekOut, we now display highly accurate salary information for many candidate roles. In the cases where we don’t have salary information, we provide a link to other sources of salary information.

AI Everywhere

With this release, SeekOut’s AI and machine learning capabilities are even more useful.

AI Matching in SeekOut is more streamlined, letting you create a new AI Matching project in seconds and giving you the flexibility to adjust any requirement quickly.

Candidate Cloning is a brand-new feature that gives you the power to automatically find others who are similar to your best-fit candidates. It’s based on our AI Matching engine, so it gives you the flexibility to combine AI with manual filters (or even Boolean) and learns from your feedback.

If you have a list of candidates you’ve found with another source, you can upload the list and get full candidate details with SeekOut’s AI-powered matching and bulk enrichment.

More Discoverable

The SeekOut homepage is now a dashboard that lets you quickly start something new or jump back into your previous project. From the dashboard, you can get to Search, AI Matching, Insights and more with one click.

We’ve reimagined Power Filters to make them simpler to find and easier to reuse. As before, Power Filters give you instant access to complex searches with just one click. Now, you can search for Power Filters, see a clear description of what each one does, and use the Recent Power Filters section lets to get to your favorite filters quickly.

More Customizable

SeekOut has more than 40 filters to help you focus your candidate searches. To make it easier to use your favorites, we now support customized filters for each talent pool. Just select the filters you use most often and arrange them in the order that makes the most sense to you. When you need any other filters, they’re always available through the View All Filters pop-up.

Thank you

We hope these changes make your sourcing and recruiting easier, more efficient & fun. We’re inspired by the creative ways you use SeekOut and are so grateful for your partnership. Please let us know how we can continue to improve SeekOut to make you more successful.

P.S.

Our team has made many other improvements to SeekOut during these strange lockdown days. (Some people fill their downtime by baking bread; we just write more code.) If you haven’t seen our industry-leading Diversity Sourcing improvements that find 3X more diverse candidates, Enhanced Clearance Filters for finding 2x more candidates with US security clearances, Company Alumni search, Referrals for harnessing your team’s connections, GitHub Issues Search for identifying collaborative technologist, Levels Filters for targeting employees with the right seniority & much more, please reach out for a SeekOut demo today.


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