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Anoop Gupta is the co-founder and CEO of SeekOut, an AI-powered recruiting platform. Founded in 2015, the company has amassed over $180 million in funding at a $1.2 billion valuation from investors including Tiger Global Management and Madrona Venture Group. Gupta told HR Brew about SeekOut’s tech and how he hopes it will solve employers’ recruiting and retention issues.
What product or service does your company offer? The best companies are people-first companies because people are what give companies a competitive advantage. To be a people-first company, we believe that companies need to have a clear understanding of the talent they have and the talent they need…SeekOut is a platform that gives the complete picture of all talent, both internal and external.
So, we are a company that is used for recruitment, retention, and growth. The retention and growth part is new in our journey [and was] launched this year. Our business has been built on the talent acquisition side.
How does it work? On the recruitment side, we build very comprehensive profiles that come from public sources—public LinkedIn, public GitHub, public StackOverflow, public papers and patents…job databases—so we have the richest database of people and then the richest possible search engine…and talent analytics and how to engage…If [a company] is looking for diverse candidates, if they’re trying to understand diversity of talent skills, and analytics, [or] if they’re looking for deep tech talent, [it’s] for all of those things.
What is the specific issue your company hopes to solve? It is critical for companies, especially when the economy is down, to say, “How do I retain my best talent? How do I develop my talent for the new priorities and the vision that we have?” Doing it when you don’t know the basics, when you’re flying blind, is not a very helpful thing. That is not how you optimize your talent. In some senses, talent is a business problem, it is not [an] HR problem. HR is there to help.
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I get fired as the head of engineering if I’m not delivering on my priorities. CHROs need to step up to solve this problem. And we can help them in a short timeframe to achieve the goals that they have set for themselves, their employees, and the company.
What kind of companies are your primary customers? Our customers are the top tech companies in the world, the top defense companies, the top pharma companies, the top consulting companies.
How do you think HR tech will evolve over the next five years? HR will need to become much more data driven. Our belief is in human-driven AI, rather than AI as substituting [for humans]...We understand AI much more deeply. People use the term “AI,” [but] they are loose about what problems AI can solve and is good at, and what problems it is not. I believe that AI will have a very important role to play. But [it] will not be a substitute for humans. AI is best used when it is doing the grunt work.
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