Most companies these days emphasize hiring staff from diverse communities. However, the challenge is to find diverse candidates with the right talent and qualifications. This is what motivated the idea of SeekOut, a startup that uses an AI-powered platform for recruiting more diverse candidates.
The impeccable business model of the startup has recently attracted an impressive raise of $65 million as per azevedotechcrunch. The company was founded in the year 2016 by a group of former executives and engineers of Microsoft, Anoop Gupta, Aravind Bala, John Tippett, and Vikas Manocha. SeekOut initially offered a messaging platform that provided in-depth information about people. The messaging platform negated the need of emailing those pieces of information. Eventually, the team realized that the customers needed just the information and not the messaging capability. So, the company pivoted in 2017.
Now, the goal of SeekOut is to help companies in achieving effective talent acquisition. The startup eases out the hard-to-find diverse talent task for the companies. The company did not reveal the names but claims to have worked with the 10 most highly valued companies with respect to the market cap in the U.S. As of last year, SeekOut had around 500 customers across a range of industries, including Information Technology to Pharmaceutical, aerospace as well as defense and banking.
In a short span, SeekOut has an AI-powered talent search engine to build a database with hundreds of millions of profiles. The deep interactive analytics of the platform finds talent by scouring public data. The tool uses machine-learning technologies and a natural language to analyze the expertise of each candidate. Thus, creating a 360-degree view of each potential employee and landing them just at the right place. SeekOut specifically blends info from GitHub, papers and patents, public profiles, employee referrals as well as company alumni in ATS systems. The company started by focusing strictly on technical talents. However, with time it has broadened its horizon. It now gives the recruiters looking for a wide range of skill sets a way to engage with potential candidates with a single click. It plans on improving the effectiveness of its platform and enabling recruitment at unprecedented speed and precision with the help of a blind hiring method designed to reduce bias.