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Searching with SeekOut

Learn how to use SeekOut to find the best candidates for your open roles.

Understanding SeekOut Profiles

    Candidate Pools

    1. Public Profiles

      SeekOut's Public profiles cover all roles including professional experience, education, skills, interests, and much more.

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    2. SeekOut for Healthcare

      SeekOut for Healthcare extends the candidate pool available to you by enriching millions of existing healthcare worker profiles with data from the National Provider Identifier Standard (NPI) database, as well as adding hundreds of thousands of new prospects to the talent pool.

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    3. Can I source candidates outside of the United States?

      Yes, SeekOut supports searching and creating messaging campaigns for candidates internationally.

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    4. Find a Candidate Using a LinkedIn URL

      If you know the LinkedIn URL of a specific candidate, you can use part of the URL to look for their profile in SeekOut.

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    5. Search: Other Networks tab

      SeekOut provides custom search engines, or CSEs, for finding candidate profiles and information on a wide variety of other social and professional networks. You'll find these CSEs under the Other Networks tab at the top of the SeekOut search page.

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    6. What industries are listed in SeekOut?

      See article for full list of industries and industry filters.

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    Keyword/Boolean Searches

    1. Boolean & Field-Based Search

      When you type words or phrases into the Keywords search box, we use the latest machine learning and search technology to bring relevant results to the top. If you want more control over your search, you can use SeekOut's advanced Boolean search syntax.

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    2. Advanced Boolean search with SeekOut

      SeekOut supports advanced search syntax. If you want to go beyond keywords and basic Boolean, try these advanced query functions. Many of these methods can be combined to form very specific candidate searches.

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    3. Creative Ways to Search with SeekOut

      Here are some real-life examples of searches from users of SeekOut using Boolean.

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    SeekOut Search Filters

    1. Power Filters

      Power Filters provide one-click access to a growing number of candidate attributes. Because you don't have to rely on long Boolean strings, power filters make complex sourcing tasks much easier.

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    2. An Overview of SeekOut's Filters

      An overview of all the available filters for public profiles, and how filters operate across multiple categories

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    3. Identify Candidates Open to New Opportunities

      The filter Likely Open to New Roles uses a machine learning algorithm to predict which candidates are most likely to change jobs within the next 12 months.

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    4. Company Alumni Filter

      SeekOut's Company Alumni filter is a powerful and unique tool that allows you to quickly find people who have left a specific company and gain deep insights into who those people are and where they went.

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    5. Experience and Education Filters

      SeekOut groups similar filters together into categories. These categories allow you to combine filters in unique ways, making it even easier to find untapped talent with specific or uncommon skills and experience. 

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    6. Time Zones: Time Differences and The Time Zone Filter

      When viewing a candidate's profile, you can see at-a-glance the time difference based on their time zone and your location.

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    7. Security Clearance Filters

      Security Clearance Filters help find cleared candidates with the ability to filter by 12 different clearance, access, and screening levels including Public Trust, Secret, Full Scope Poly, and Yankee White.

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    8. How to request Custom Power Filters for your organization

      We know you don't want to spend time manually building searches that arise on a consistent basis. SeekOut can help by deploying Custom search filters in your UI so you have one-click access to desired talent pools.

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    9. Keyword Highlighting in SeekOut

      SeekOut highlights terms on candidate profiles that match or are close approximations to the keywords you use when searching.

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    10. Select and reorder candidate filters

      You can customize and re-order the filters that appear on the left side of your Search page by clicking View All Filters.

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    11. Create your own Power Filters

      SeekOut provides a number of power filters by default, and you can save many of your public profile searches as custom power filters. Your team admin can also save a public profile search as a custom power filter and share it with your organization.

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    Automating Your Search with AI

    1. How do I Clone a Candidate or a Project?

      With SeekOut, it's possible to clone candidates and projects. When you clone a candidate, SeekOut will use machine learning to search for candidates with similar experience and skills.

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    Diversity

    1. Bias Reducer

      The Bias Reducer (formerly known as blind hiring mode) helps you curb unconscious bias in your candidate evaluation by eliminating obvious indicators of race or gender.

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    2. Diversity Filters

      We know diverse teams do better work, are happier, and directly improve the bottom line. Diversity has never been more important, yet many organizations struggle to create diverse representation in enterprise, technology, and leadership roles.​

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    Searching GitHub

    1. Sourcing GitHub candidates with SeekOut

      SeekOut's GitHub search lets you find software developer candidates in a completely new way.

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    2. What is Coder Score and how is it calculated?

      SeekOut analyzes code contributions from GitHub users to determine how well-accepted or influential their code is. Using that analysis, we assign each member a Coder Score of one to five stars based on their demonstrated contributions.

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    3. Advanced Search Syntax with GitHub search

      As with Public Profile search, SeekOut supports a wide range of field-specific search capabilities in GitHub candidate search.

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    Expert Searches

    1. Advanced Search Syntax with Expert search

      SeekOut Expert is a unique capability of some SeekOut subscriptions which give you access to nearly tens of millions of engineering, computer science, and life sciences experts.

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    2. SeekOut Recruit | Expert Talent Pool

      SeekOut Expert Search is the best way to find untapped talent who are subject matter experts in almost any technical field including engineering, machine learning, biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, medicine, finance, and more.

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    Best Practices

    1. X-Ray search vs. SeekOut search

      Some savvy recruiters use X-Ray search on Google or Bing to find profiles. It's a useful technique for bringing back only certain kinds of pages when searching on Google or Bing.

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    2. People Insights

      SeekOut's People Insights feature gives you a bird's eye view of any talent pool. From any search, you can zoom out to see the aggregate data about those candidates' location, employers, titles, skills, employment history, diversity and more.

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    Frequently asked questions

    Questions and answers we've heard a few times, and might be able to quickly help.

    No worries! You can reset your password by clicking Forgot your password? at the bottom of the Sign In page. We have a full article for more questions, here.

    Each SeekOut plan includes credits for finding candidate contact info and credits for exporting candidate information. To learn more about contact info credits, we have a full article here; and to learn more about exporting candidate information, we have another article here.

    A SeekOut administrator can save any public profile search can as a power filter. You can learn how to create and access those filters here.

    Upcoming trainings

    Candidate Outreach In SeekOut Projects – Simplify Your Communication Workflow (Live)

    Tuesday, March 19, 2024 at 5:00 PM UTC

    Once you've found the perfect set of profiles by leveraging SeekOut search, what's next? That's where our newly launched Candidate Outreach comes in! Join Senior Product Manager Amy Ho as she goes over how and why to leverage Candidate Outreach within SeekOut Projects to engage prospective talent.

    Sourcing in SeekOut's GitHub Talent Pool (Live)

    Wednesday, March 20, 2024 at 4:30 PM UTC

    Are you recruiting software engineers or developers? Come learn how you can leverage SeekOut's GitHub Talent Pool and unique filtering options to make technical hiring a breeze!

    Sourcing in SeekOut's Expert Talent Pool (Live)

    Thursday, March 21, 2024 at 4:30 PM UTC

    Do you find yourself sourcing for industry experts or academics? Join Tim Driscoll who'll teach you how to leverage SeekOut's Expert database to find talent with published papers or patents.