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23
Dec
SeekOut  ·  SeekOut Company Updates
SeekOut’s Customer Advisory Board

At SeekOut, our customers are the heart of our business. Beyond providing value and exceptional customer service, we strive to learn from our customers how to design products and services that meet their needs.

We are excited to officially announce the launch of SeekOut’s Customer Advisory Board (CAB). This new Customer Advisory Board partners with our product and customer success teams to make sure the voice of our customers is represented in all that we do at SeekOut. The CAB is a highly interactive group that gives strategic direction to our work.

CAB members meet quarterly to discuss industry trends and emerging challenges, give feedback on our product roadmap, and discuss business challenges. SeekOut’s CAB is comprised of the industry’s experienced talent leaders from innovative companies including Amazon, CapTech Consulting, Danaher, Esurance, Kapsch TrafficCom, Koch Industries, Niagara Bottling, Under Armour, Verb Surgical, VMware, and 23andMe. 

With the SeekOut CAB we aim to capture value and guidance from our customer. We want to hear the good, the bad, and the ugly. 

In our first CAB meeting, we:

  • Reviewed feedback on some of the newest SeekOut features, including exportable People Insights, SeekOut Robot, and ATS/CRM Rediscovery
  • Discussed workflow challenges and opportunities combing SeekOut with other tools
  • Considered the most effective ways for teams to Keene about new SeekOut features

The positive and negative feedback from the CAB has already proved very helpful to our product efforts. We look forward to all the things we will learn with the CAB in the future.


23
Dec
Diversity Recruiting  ·  SeekOut Events
3 Takeaways on Diversity: What I Learned at the From Day One Conference

With 2020 right around the corner, we must have 20/20 vision with our future diversity initiatives. The From Day One conference, held December 11th in Los Angeles, focused on diversity strategies. Here are 3 key lessons I learned from top-in-class diversity leaders.

1. Trust the Benefits, Trust the Research, and Take Action

I attended the Panel Discussion Getting Bias Out of Our Systems with panelists from CAA, Novartis, Southern California Edison, Joonko, and Control Risks. I learned that getting bias out of an individual or an entity takes a long time. It requires systemic change and “Educating a System,” not just changing individual attitudes. As diversity & inclusion leaders, it’s imperative to educate the system well enough to penetrate an inclusive framework. 

As you can imagine, this will take time.

According to Marion Brooks, VP of Diversity & Inclusion at Novartis, a well-rounded diversity initiative for your company is just an inch away with the right tactics. By fully grasping the benefits of diversity and trusting the research that has been done, you can solidify your strategy for leading this process.

Benefits:What are the known benefits of diverse teams?

  1. Higher Revenue
  2. Greater Innovation
  3. More Customer Needs Met

What the Research Says:

You can’t increase your diversity hiring with token efforts to diversify your talent pool. You need to make sure you have significant representation at the top of your talent funnel. According to the Harvard Business Review, if you only have one woman or one person of color in a slate of candidates, there is no chance statistically that they will be hired. Unconscious Bias is just too strong. But if at least two women or people of color are in the slate of candidates, the odds of hiring a diverse candidate goes up to 50% or more. By simply diversifying the final candidate pool, you can diversify your workforce.

The Strategy: 

Novartis’s Diversity Guideline: Novartis created a new Hiring Guideline in which they will make it a requirement to have at least one woman, and at least one person of color in the final candidate pool. This will launch on January 1st, 2020. 

Lesson Learned: We have statistics available, scholars have done research, and it is our responsibility to make something out of their efforts by implementing diversity initiatives. 

Speaking of using statistics… this leads me to the second lesson learned.

2. Use the Data, and Analyze the Insights

I sat in the Creating a Data-Driven D&I Strategysession presented by Anoop from SeekOut. I learned from my very own CEO that “big data is eating the world today”. Data and the insights they provide drive how CEOs and leaders run their businesses; data determines whether our businesses die, survive, or thrive.

The D&I sphere is a hugely rich and complex space that requires actionable insights backed by data to make informative decisions for your business. Data and AI can be used in the D&I space by leadership AND individuals to use as guidelines on how they can be better at our jobs every day and excel at the work that we do. 

Examples of Useful Data in the D&I space:

    % of diverse employees at your company
  1. Diversity stats of your competitors
    2. % of diverse employees by function% of diverse “data scientists” talent in a specific city/region% of diverse employees by title 

In the recruiting and talent acquisition space, data can be used to form concrete goals and solidify strategy. Tools like SeekOut can help you find all the data points above. Bringing us back to my first lesson from 1. Trust the benefits, Trust the research, and Take action, having solid researched data to present to your manager/executive will bring you closer to implementing diversity initiatives. 

Lesson Learned: Having data as your ally is an enormous advantage in knowing where you stand in your diversity efforts.

You can watch Anoop’s Breakout Session below!

3. Finesse the Tools, Make them your Ally 

My final point that I learned was that there are a multitude of tools that are our allies in D&I. Specifically, Textio was mentioned in several speaking sessions as being able to help fix gender-biased language.

  • Textio: Textio is an augmented writing platform that connects to your Applicant Tracking System, and rids any language that keep certain groups away from applying. Textio will not rewrite your job description, but it will highlight and suggest new words. This can help reduce bias out of the hiring process and keep your strategy more thoughtful. 

https://textanalysis.beapplied.com/

  • Ongig: https://www.ongig.com/features/job-description-text-analyzer-gender#/
  • Kat Manfield: http://gender-decoder.katmatfield.com/

    • Lesson Learned: My biggest takeaway from the From Day One conference is that a diverse yet inclusive vision is not a “nice to have” but a “must have”, and that doing it right takes time and deliberate effort. Implementing diversity initiatives is complex, layered, and time-consuming. However, doing it right is worth it, and you can utilize the data and finesse the tools to set you up for success.  


    23
    Sep
    SeekOut Product Updates
    SeekOut Product Updates

    Our team has been hard at work implementing a lot of new features that you have given us input on as well as of customers have asked for. These include:

    • Unified Profiles
    • More Likely to Move Jobs Filters
    • Export Talent Insights to Excel
    • Personalized Outreach to GitHub Candidates
    • ATS Rediscovery
    • Referrals

    Unified Profiles: As you know we pull in a lot of data about people beyond just what they say on their profiles. We try to get the actual work they’ve done and bring that to be searchable and discoverable so you can engage with folks. If you do a search for someone in accounting for instance, we’ll bring back links to papers they’ve written about accounting. If you search for ‘natural language engineer’, we won’t just pull back the candidates LinkedIn data, we’ll now show any papers & patents they’ve done, as well as any code from GitHub directly within the Public Profile. Of course, you can click through to see the exact code. What this means is that many more candidates come back from every search you do because we are pulling in more than what they say, and the people that come back are much more relevant and you can see why they are relevant.

    More Likely to Move feature: What this does is it applies a machine learning algorithm to predict which candidates are most likely to change jobs in the next 12-months. Let’s say you’re looking for ‘certified public accountant’ in Chicago. All you have to do is click on the More Likely to Move button, that will filter out to only show candidates who SeekOut predicts will move jobs in the next 12-months. This algorithm is very precise and will help you target your candidates better.

    Export Talent Insights: Our customers love the Talent Insights feature but have been limited because they previously could only export Talent Insights as a PDF. With this update you can now export to an Excel Spreadsheet, all the data from our Talent Insights so you can put them into a Word document, PowerPoint presentation or other document to share with your leadership.

    Personalized Outreach to GitHub Candidates: Our new GitHub engagement feature builds a paragraph of text for you to use in your outreach messages which highlights the work that a candidate has done on GitHub. By taking advantage of this automatically created summary of the candidates work on GitHub, SeekOut will help you write a more engaging message and get more responses from the candidates you care about.

    ATS Rediscovery: You have a ton of data in your ATS and in theory it should be very valuable for you but unfortunately ATS’s often have very stale data and most of them have relatively poor search. SeekOut’s ATS Rediscovery solves these problems by updating the profiles of anyone in your ATS and then allowing you to use all of SeekOut search features to find them again. With SeekOut you can target your search at anyone who is already in your ATS. See who in your company is working with them and how long ago they were updated. You can even target silver medalists and other attributes in your ATS combined with the power of SeekOut search. Click through to see their record in your ATS to see the full details of your interaction with them. Want to target candidates who have never applied to your company? You can do that too with just a click of a button

    Referrals: SeekOut now allows your team members to upload their connections and then for you to filter to only find candidates who are connected to someone on your team. Once you’ve found the candidate and you see who they’re connected to, SeekOut makes it easy to reach out to that internal team member and ask for feedback. When you reach out, they get an email with a link and with just a few clicks can tell you whether they recommend the candidate or not and whether they’d be willing to reach out and talk to that candidate on your behalf. As soon as your internal teammate has given you feedback on the potential referral, you’ll see the info in your project.

    Request a meeting to experience the enhancements for yourself: seekout.com/requestdemo


    06
    Sep
    SeekOut
    SeekOut Unified Profiles Webinar

    In this short 17-minute webinar recording you will listen to SeekOut’s CEO, Anoop Gupta and Head of Product, John Tippett discuss how Unified Profiles can improve your effectiveness by exposing what candidates have actually done, not just what they have said about themselves.

    This latest feature to help you find more – and more – qualified candidates


    22
    Aug
    SeekOut Product Updates
    Announcing Unified Profiles | Find More Qualified Candidates Faster

    SeekOut’s mission is to help you find the best candidates by giving you the most powerful search over the most comprehensive candidate database. Our candidate profiles cover not just what users say about themselves but also what they’ve done. These Whole Person Profiles let you discover the best candidates and understand their true skills. We’ve just launched a major update to our Whole Person Profiles.

    Unified Profiles
    We’re improving the way we display Full Person Profiles so SeekOut Premium Tech and SeekOut Expert customers can more easily understand the full background of each candidate. In addition to the public profile details, key matches, and expertise tags we’ve always shown, we now augment candidate results with information about a candidate’s Open Source code contributions, academic research, and patents. We call this Unified Profiles.

    A Comprehensive View of Each Candidate
    You’ll still search SeekOut using any of our search capabilities – keywords, Power Filters, Boolean strings, or SeekOut Robot. But where you used to see a more limited profile, you’ll now see information about the GitHub contributions of each software developer – including SeekOut Coder Score and links to their actual code. And for any candidates who have been awarded patents or done academic research, you’ll see these accomplishments directly on their profile.

    Many of these strong candidates don’t bother to describe their detailed work on their LinkedIn profile, so they aren’t discoverable with other tools. By unifying these profiles, SeekOut helps you find more candidates – and the candidates you discover will be even higher quality.

    More – and More Qualified – Candidates for Your Hard-to-Find Roles
    Let’s look at an example. Before today, if you were trying to find a software developer in Nashville with 5-10 years of experience and expertise in IOS, you’d find about 1300 results. With SeekOut’s new Unified Profiles, the same search will return 160 more qualified candidates.

    Even better, SeekOut will show you more information about each candidate.

    Where you used to see the what the candidate says about themselves, you now see full details of their software expertise, their coding expertise and Coder Score, as well as links to their actual Open Source code contributions.

    Similarly, when sourcing Life Sciences or Engineering talent, SeekOut’s Unified Profiles now search and display information from the patents, research, and papers of expert candidates. This means you find more qualified candidates.

    For instance, a search for magnetic resonance imaging angiography will now reveal more than twice as many candidates. And it will be much more clear which candidates have the specific background and skills you need. See how the unified profile below shows specific  expertise gleaned from the candidate’s patents and research.

    Improve Your Candidate Discovery Today
    If you’re a SeekOut Premium Tech or Expert subscriber, Unified Profiles are active on your account today. If you’re not yet a Premium Tech or Expert subscriber and would like to see how this new capability can lead to more effective talent acquisition strategy, let us know. We’d be happy to show you. Request a demo or contact us.


    19
    Jul
    Diversity Recruiting  ·  SeekOut Product Updates
    Custom Pictures Added to Blind Hiring Mode

    You’ve asked—we delivered! We’ve updated Blind Hiring Mode in SeekOut to let users customize the images that replace the candidate’s photo. If you don’t like the default image of the cat, you can change it to an image of your favorite pet, animal, or virtually any custom image you prefer.

    To change the cat picture follow these steps:

    1. Click on your name in the upper right hand corner of SeekOut
    2. Click on ‘Account’
    3. Click ‘Change Blind Hiring Picture’

    What is Blind Hiring Mode in SeekOut?

    If you’re unfamiliar with Blind Hiring Mode, it’s a SeekOut feature that mitigates unconscious bias by removing names, photos, email addresses, educational backgrounds, and other identifiable information from a candidate’s profile. This ensures talent acquisition professionals only evaluate qualifications when considering candidates for open roles.

    Many people are opened minded and believe they don’t have biases, especially recruiters striving to increase the diversity in their organization. However, everyone has unconscious biases that influence their decision-making without them knowing it.

    Examples of unconscious bias in candidate assessments:

    • Appearance bias – The photo a candidate includes on their public profile can lead to biases based on their appearance.
    • Name bias – Uncommon names can result in assumptions about the candidate’s nationality and if they’re a native English speaker.
    • Education bias – The college a candidate attended can trigger unfair conclusions about their intelligence and work ethic.
    • Age bias – A candidate’s age—whether they be older or younger—can cause biases about their skills, professionalism, or work ethic.

    If you want to learn how SeekOut can help you prevent biases in your candidate assessments and accomplish your diversity hiring goals, request a demo today!

     


    19
    Jul
    SeekOut Events
    Join Us @ HRTX: August 1st

    HRTX is a single-day event bringing together top TA and Recruiting Leaders for a full day of workshops taught by some of the industry’s brightest.

    Our CEO, Anoop Gupta will be presenting- you don’t want to miss out!

    Presentation Title: Go Beyond LinkedIn
    Presentation Overview: Experience how SeekOut empowers you to recruit hard-to-find and diverse talent (especially for developers/engineers/scientists) for your company.  Backed by intuitive AI search and personalized messaging, SeekOut provides you timely whole-person profiles of in-demand professionals.

    Date: Thursday, August 1st
    Time: 8:00AM-5:45pm PDT
    Location: 155 5th St, 6th Floor, San Francisco, CA 94103


    17
    Jul
    SeekOut Product Updates
    SeekOut Goes (Even More) Global
    SeekOut’s GitHub and Expert search have always covered candidates worldwide, but our Public Profile database was US and Canada only. Our brand new global index of Public Profile candidates — 423 million candidates worldwide (and counting).

    To get started sourcing global public profiles, choose a region from the dropdown next to the top search box.

    Screen Shot 2019-07-09 at 9.52.09 PM.png

    (Note that Canada and the US are now in separate regions. Choose North America for Canadian candidates.)

    Global public profiles are included in every SeekOut subscription. You can use all the features of your subscription — field-based search, messaging, SeekOut Robot, and People Insights — with candidate from any region.


    17
    Jul
    SeekOut
    Level Up Your Sourcing Game

    It’s a new era of sourcing! Learn how you can spend your time more wisely by balancing old and new techniques to set up your entire sourcing life cycle for success!

    SeekOut CEO, Anoop Gupta chats with Sarah Goldberg, Sourcing Engagement Lead at Objective Paradigm about different ways Sourcers can work smarter to source high volumes of candidates.

    Topics Include:

    • How you can structure your day for an efficient & effective workflow
    • How to balance new tools and old techniques
    • Sourcing tips & tricks