SeekOut Brings GPT4 To Recruiters. Eightfold Launches Copilots For HR.

Two exciting AI announcements for HR today: SeekOut Assist and Eightfold Copilots for HR.

SeekOut Announcement: Giving Recruiters SuperPowers

SeekOut, a fast-growing recruiting and talent intelligence vendor, introduced one of the most exciting new applications of Generative AI today: Seekout Assist. This new product, which builds on the company’s powerful talent intelligence platform, gives recruiters and HR leaders one of the most “instant on” uses of GPT to super-power recruiting.

Here’s how it works.

SeekOut, like Eightfold, Beamery, and Gloat, is built on a massive data platform with close to a billion worker profiles. The company has been selling a powerful search and sourcing system that lets recruiters and HR leaders find job candidates (and internal staff) by understanding skills, job experience, credentials, and professional certifications. With technology similar to Eightfold, the system uses advanced AI (I call it Second Generation Talent Intelligence, which we’ll talk about later) to understand people’s “in-context skills” for hiring, eliminating bias and the need to rely on college degrees or similar experience alone.

This core technology, which has become one of the most important innovations in HR (and business), looks at people’s work history, their actual work output (software code they’ve written, nursing credentials, cyber-security certificates, and more) to infer, identify, and understand people’s true capabilities. Unlike first generation AI that simply indexed words, systems like SeekOut and Eightfold go far deeper: looking at where people worked, who they worked with, and other signals that define a person’s job fit (including location, likelihood of changing jobs, and more).

To date, the company has sold this system to recruiters and HR managers and currently has more than 1000 customers using the system.

Today, with the new SeekOut Assist feature, the platform does what I call “superhuman recruiting.” You can simply cut and paste a job description into a screen and the system uses GPT4 AI to decode the job requirements (the job title, description, required skills, recommended skills, desired education, etc.), execute a series of “smart searches” SeekOut database, and immediately return best-fit candidates.

The Assist returns a top candidate and a ranked set of good fits along with a series of search criteria on the left. The recruiter can then “de-select” or change the criteria to refine the search instantly, saving hours of time to figure out how to search, try to type “boolean queries,” or go back and search over and over to see what works.

In other words, it’s a Copilot for candidate search, optimized to use the GPT conversational system. The profiles that come back have each “skill” or “criteria” highlighted so you can see how it made decisions, letting you understand the “explainability” of the AI and showing the recruiter why this candidate is such a strong fit.

But there’s more.

Once this is completed, the system automatically creates a personalized email to help you approach the candidate, with well worded personalized language, highlighting this person’s interest and experience. The candidate communications panel lets you play with the language (you can focus on career growth, flexibility, culture, or wellbeing) and automatically craft just the message you like.

The system then lets the recruiter send the message, and like many other candidate relationship management (CRM) systems, tracks the communications between recruiter and candidate.

Why This Is A Pioneering Solution

Given that the underlying technology here is GPT4, will every recruiting tech vendor do this? Yes, it’s coming, but SeekOut came out first.

Note that the founders of SeekOut, Anoop Gupta and Aravind Bala, are ex-Microsoft executives (Anoop was a Corporate VP and Aravind worked under Satya Nadella on Bing) so they understand the power of OpenAI and its potential in HR.

Why This Feature Is Important

Let me explain why these features matter. Our new research on recruiting shows that time-to-hire is getting longer every quarter. Our benchmarks in this area (conducted in partnership with AMS), found that over the last six months the “time to hire” has increased by almost 30%. Despite some layoffs, job seekers are ever-more discriminating. Candidates are looking for inflation-protected pay, flexibility, and a job with security.

How do recruiters adapt? They do more searches, send more inquiries, and waste lots of time talking with the wrong person. And our research on the talent acquisition function shows that the most predictable business practice that drives quality hiring is “the quality, experience, and skills of the recruiter.” So recruiters, who are now becoming “talent advisors,” are the “super jobs” that make the company grow.

You may say “we’re in a hiring freeze” and recruiting isn’t important right now, but that’s not true at all. Every company we talk with (including those doing layoffs) are still recruiting like crazy, looking for frontline positions in retail, healthcare, and consumer services. And most companies still need skilled people in AI, technology, and digital platforms.

Interestingly enough, when we correlate our HR research studies against financial outcomes, growth, and human capital metrics, the HR practice that correlates the highest with business performance is talent acquisition. And that’s because the most important decision you make is who you hire. Companies that deeply understand how to hire the right people (and all the complexity it entails) are better run companies and they endure and thrive over time.

So when I see a solution that “super-powers” recruiters, I sit up in my seat and look closely. This new solution from SeekOut is important.

Other Vendors Are Close Behind: Eightfold Launches Copilots For HR

Let’s not leave out other vendors adopting GPT4. Beamery launched their assistant TalentGPT last week, and today Eightfold introduced its prompt-based Recruiter Copilot (and Employee Copilot). While demos of the Eightfold tool are not yet available, we can expect an interview assistant and other features for search.

The language features and chat-based interface of GPT will become essential. OpenAI has now created a marketplace for ChatGPT plugins,. enabling any HR data provider to offer its service in a conversational interface. OpenTable, for example, will soon let you ask about restaurants and make reservations through ChatGPT. As I talked about in last week’s podcast, this means every HR tech vendor will have to adapt.

This Is Just The Beginning

This is just the beginning. As vendors like SeekOut, Beamery, and Eightfold roll out their intelligent interfaces, others will follow soon.

Remember: systems like SeekOut, Eightfold, Beamery, Gloat, Phenom, and iCims are really Talent Intelligence platforms. They store millions of employee and candidate records, using AI to identify skills, career paths, successors, and even mentors. Once we can query these systems with ChatGPT, we will unlock hundreds of “Copilot” use cases.

If you are looking at building a skills-centric strategy, turbo-charging your recruiting, or improving your company’s succession, growth, or learning, please contact us.

We are conducting a series of Talent Intelligence Bootcamps and will soon launch a new course on Career Growth and Talent Mobility in the Josh Bersin Academy.  Contact us if you’d like to learn about our corporate membership.

Additional Information

HR-GPT Arriving Now. Beamery Starts The Generative AI Revolution in HR.

New MIT Research Shows Spectacular Increase In White Collar Productivity From ChatGPT

Microsoft Launches OpenAI CoPilots For Dynamics Apps And The Enterprise.

Workday’s Response To AI and Machine Learning: Moving Faster Than Ever

Bill Gates Sees Generative AI As The Biggest Thing Since Windows

Understanding Chat-GPT, And Why It’s Even Bigger Than You Think (*updated)

What Is A Large Language Model (LLM) Anyway? (good overview)

Comeet ATS Launches Powerful and Industry-Leading Recruiting AI Assistant