Research Date: February 2026 Data Source: IndustryLabs database — 67 AI-native HR tools Last Updated: February 21, 2026
SeekOut is an AI-powered talent intelligence and sourcing platform built to help recruiting teams find and engage passive candidates — particularly those who are hardest to reach through conventional job board advertising. Founded in 2017 and headquartered in Bellevue, Washington, SeekOut aggregates professional profiles from across the open web and enriches them with AI-generated skills inference, diversity signals, and contact data. Its defining differentiator is the breadth and freshness of its talent data: the platform indexes over 800 million professional profiles and uses machine learning to surface candidates who match a nuanced talent brief, not just a keyword list.
What is SeekOut?
Quick Answer
SeekOut is an AI-powered talent sourcing and intelligence platform that indexes over 800 million professional profiles from across the open web. It uses machine learning to surface passive candidates matching a skills-based talent brief, with dedicated search filters for diversity attributes, technical skills, and hard-to-find specialisations. Founded in 2017 in Bellevue, Washington, it serves recruiting teams at mid-market and enterprise companies that have exhausted LinkedIn Recruiter as a primary sourcing channel. According to IndustryLabs analysis of 67 AI-native HR tools, SeekOut is one of the strongest platforms in the database for passive candidate discovery and diversity sourcing.
SeekOut was founded by Anoop Gupta, Viswanath Srikanth, and John Henning — engineers and researchers with backgrounds at Microsoft and academic AI research — around the problem that most sourcing tools reflect a single talent pool (LinkedIn) and produce identical shortlists for every recruiter targeting the same role. Their approach was to build a platform that aggregates profiles from GitHub, patents, academic publications, conference papers, and open-source contribution histories, alongside standard professional profile data, to give recruiters signal about candidate capability that their competitors cannot easily replicate.
The platform operates across three core use cases. Talent Sourcing provides AI-assisted search across the full 800 million profile database, with filters for technical skills, diversity attributes, location, company, and inferred career trajectory. Talent Pipeline Management allows recruiters to organise shortlisted candidates into projects, track engagement, and export into their ATS. Diversity Sourcing gives recruiting teams the ability to set representation goals and surface candidate pools that meet them — a capability that has made SeekOut a frequent choice for organisations running structured DE&I hiring initiatives alongside their core sourcing workflows.
Who is SeekOut best for?
Quick Answer
SeekOut is best for talent acquisition teams at companies with 100 or more employees that are actively sourcing passive candidates and have found LinkedIn Recruiter insufficient for technical, scientific, or underrepresented talent pools. It is particularly strong for engineering, data science, research, and executive recruiting, where candidate quality and diversity signals matter more than application volume, and where candidates' real capability is better reflected in open-source contributions, patents, or academic records than in traditional job histories.
SeekOut is not primarily an inbound recruiting tool. It does not replace an ATS or career site. It is a sourcing intelligence layer designed to be used alongside an existing recruiting stack. Teams that rely primarily on inbound applications and job boards will not extract full value from the platform's sourcing capabilities.
The ideal SeekOut buyer is a senior recruiter, sourcing specialist, or head of talent acquisition at a technology, life sciences, financial services, or engineering company that regularly fills roles where qualified candidates actively avoid job boards. Company size fit spans from fast-scaling startups with 100 employees building their first technical recruiting capability through to global enterprise organisations running dedicated sourcing teams. According to IndustryLabs analysis of 67 AI-native HR tools, SeekOut's combination of breadth (800 million profiles) and depth (technical and academic data layers) is uncommon in the database — most sourcing tools either have breadth or vertical depth, not both simultaneously.
What are SeekOut's key features?
Quick Answer
SeekOut's key features include AI-powered talent search across 800 million profiles with skills-based and diversity filters, technical recruiting tools that search GitHub, Stack Overflow, and open-source repositories for software engineering talent, a diversity sourcing module with representation goal-setting and funnel analytics, automated candidate outreach sequencing, and a talent pipeline management workspace for organising and tracking shortlisted candidates through to ATS hand-off.
The core search experience is SeekOut's primary differentiator. Recruiters can build talent briefs using natural language prompts or structured filters — the AI then infers skills and experience signals from across the aggregated profile data, not just from self-declared job titles and descriptions. This means a recruiter searching for a machine learning engineer with production MLOps experience can surface candidates whose GitHub repositories and publication records demonstrate that capability, even if their LinkedIn headline reads "Software Engineer."
The diversity sourcing module allows recruiting teams to set gender, ethnicity, and veteran status representation goals and view real-time pipeline composition metrics as they build shortlists. This makes SeekOut a common choice for organisations running structured DE&I hiring programmes that require both sourcing volume and demographic pipeline visibility in the same tool. Automated outreach sequencing allows recruiters to build multi-touch email campaigns directly from SeekOut, with personalisation tokens and response tracking, reducing the context-switching involved in managing outreach across separate email tools.
Talent pipeline projects provide a structured workspace for managing candidates through the sourcing process: adding notes, tracking engagement, collaborating with other team members, and pushing approved candidates directly into integrated ATS platforms. You can view SeekOut's full profile, including verified integration and compliance data, at /tools/seekout.
How much does SeekOut cost?
Quick Answer
SeekOut uses annual subscription pricing based on the number of recruiter seats and the modules included. Based on publicly available market data, annual contracts typically range from £25,000 to £85,000 for mid-market teams, with enterprise agreements for large sourcing operations ranging higher depending on seat count and the inclusion of diversity analytics and advanced AI modules. SeekOut does not publish list pricing; buyers receive custom quotes based on their team size and use case.
Pricing is estimated based on public information and may not reflect current vendor pricing. Verify directly with the vendor.
The total cost includes the platform subscription and any professional services for onboarding and integration setup. For organisations connecting SeekOut to an existing ATS via API, there may be additional implementation time required from the recruiting operations team. SeekOut's pricing model is per-seat rather than per-hire or per-volume, which means unit economics improve as sourcing teams scale their usage across multiple active requisitions and business units. According to IndustryLabs analysis of 67 AI-native HR tools, SeekOut falls in the £25–50K annual pricing band — consistent with the mid-tier of specialist sourcing platforms in the database that serve mid-market to enterprise buyers.
What does SeekOut integrate with?
Quick Answer
SeekOut integrates natively with Greenhouse, Lever, and Workday for ATS candidate export, with Salesforce for CRM-based talent pipeline management, and with LinkedIn Recruiter for cross-platform profile enrichment. It connects to BambooHR and other HRIS platforms for employee data context. An API is available for custom integrations with other ATS and HRIS platforms not covered by native connectors.
SeekOut's integration architecture is designed to make it an additive layer on top of an existing recruiting stack rather than a replacement for it. The Greenhouse and Lever integrations allow recruiters to push shortlisted candidates directly from SeekOut into active requisitions in their ATS without re-keying data — reducing the friction that typically causes sourced candidates to be tracked in spreadsheets rather than in the system of record. The Workday integration supports similar candidate hand-off workflows for enterprise organisations running Workday Recruiting.
The Salesforce integration is used primarily by enterprise talent acquisition teams that manage executive pipelines and strategic talent relationships within Salesforce CRM rather than a traditional ATS. SeekOut's profile enrichment capabilities can pull data into Salesforce records, providing additional candidate intelligence for relationship-driven recruiting workflows. For context on the applicant tracking systems market and how SeekOut's integration depth compares to ATS-native sourcing features, the IndustryLabs category page covers verified data across the full ATS and talent intelligence landscape.
Is SeekOut GDPR / SOC 2 / ISO 27001 compliant?
Quick Answer
SeekOut claims GDPR compliance and SOC 2 Type II certification. For UK and EU employers, GDPR compliance is particularly significant given that SeekOut's core function involves aggregating and processing personal data from public web sources about individuals who have not explicitly consented to being profiled on the platform. SOC 2 Type II certification addresses enterprise security and data handling requirements that procurement teams in regulated sectors typically require as a minimum standard.
Compliance certifications are vendor-supplied. IndustryLabs has not independently audited these claims. Verify current certification status directly with the vendor.
GDPR compliance for a web-aggregated talent database requires careful legal basis analysis — SeekOut relies on legitimate interest as the lawful basis for processing candidate data, which requires a balancing test and documented privacy notices. UK and EU buyers should request SeekOut's data processing agreement, review their data retention and deletion processes, and confirm how candidate opt-out requests are handled across the platform's aggregated data sources. The SOC 2 Type II certification, covering a period of continuous audit rather than a point-in-time assessment, provides assurance that security and availability controls have been consistently applied — a requirement that procurement teams in financial services, healthcare, and other regulated sectors typically mandate before approving new vendor relationships.
How does SeekOut compare to alternatives?
Quick Answer
SeekOut's closest alternatives in the talent sourcing space are Eightfold AI, Findem, and LinkedIn Recruiter. Eightfold AI is broader, covering the full talent lifecycle including internal mobility and workforce planning, while SeekOut focuses specifically on sourcing intelligence. Findem uses a similar attribute-based people intelligence model but emphasises pipeline automation. LinkedIn Recruiter has the largest single talent pool but lacks SeekOut's technical and diversity-specific data layers.
Eightfold AI competes with SeekOut in talent intelligence but serves a different primary use case. Where SeekOut is a specialist sourcing tool optimised for finding passive candidates in hard-to-reach talent pools, Eightfold is a full talent lifecycle platform that covers external sourcing alongside internal mobility, workforce planning, and people analytics. Organisations that need deep sourcing capability without the full platform complexity — and associated cost — often find SeekOut a more precisely matched fit.
Findem shares SeekOut's attribute-based approach to people intelligence but differentiates through its pipeline automation and talent analytics capabilities. Findem's 3D data model layers work history, skills, and behavioural signals across its talent database, and its pipeline workflows are designed to automate more of the sourcing-to-outreach sequence. The choice between SeekOut and Findem often comes down to whether a team values technical depth (SeekOut's GitHub and publication data) versus pipeline automation and analytics (Findem's strengths).
LinkedIn Recruiter remains the default sourcing tool for many recruiting teams due to its scale and the fact that most professionals maintain LinkedIn profiles. SeekOut's argument against LinkedIn Recruiter is that everyone with a recruiting budget has access to the same LinkedIn pool — its differentiation lies in surfacing candidates through signals that LinkedIn cannot provide. For teams already sourcing effectively on LinkedIn and looking to extend reach into technical or underrepresented talent pools, SeekOut is the more logical complement than replacement.
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