Enterprise talent acquisition teams are facing an unprecedented challenge. Companies emerging from hiring freezes need to ramp up quickly, but their recruiting teams haven’t grown. Meanwhile, the volume of applications has exploded every job posting now generates hundreds of resumes, many AI-generated and keyword-stuffed, creating an impossible screening burden for human recruiters.
We recently spoke with Bala Vishwanath, CMO at SeekOut, about how the company is addressing this challenge through agentic AI. When we talk about agentic AI in recruiting, we’re not talking about a dressed-up chatbot we’re talking about autonomous agents that work alongside expert recruiters to make them more effective and productive in transforming the top-of-funnel recruiting process. After seven years of building semantic search intelligence across over a billion profiles, SeekOut has launched a service that promises to deliver interview-ready candidates in days rather than months.
Through our advisory work with HR technology vendors, we’ve seen countless companies attempt to solve recruiting’s speed-quality paradox. Most focus on either automation or human expertise, but rarely achieve both effectively. SeekOut’s approach caught our attention because it fundamentally rethinks the recruiter’s role rather than simply digitizing existing processes.
The Market Reality: When AI Creates More Problems Than It Solves
The recruiting industry finds itself in a peculiar position. AI tools have made it trivially easy for job seekers to generate customized resumes and cover letters for every application, flooding companies with hundreds of seemingly qualified candidates. As Vishwanath explained, “You need intelligence to understand that what I’ve described is really what is needed… if I am a good developer that has built scalable systems, like let’s say for Netflix, I wouldn’t necessarily use keywords in my resume.”
This creates a vicious cycle: recruiters can’t manually review 500+ applications per role, so they rely on keyword-based screening tools that miss the best passive candidates the Netflix engineer who describes building “viral apps that scaled to millions of users” rather than using buzzwords like “scalable infrastructure.”
Several companies have emerged to tackle different aspects of this challenge:
- Paradox is a conversational AI platform that automates high-volume candidate engagement through its chatbot Olivia, focusing primarily on screening, interview scheduling, and candidate communication for retail, hospitality, and other high-volume sectors.
- HireVue specializes in AI-powered video interviewing and assessment technology, using behavioral analysis and predictive analytics to evaluate candidates through pre-recorded interviews, serving primarily enterprise-scale organizations.
- Eightfold AI operates a comprehensive talent intelligence platform that goes beyond hiring to include workforce planning, internal mobility, and skills development, leveraging deep learning across talent acquisition, talent management, and workforce analytics.
- HireEZ has evolved from AI-powered candidate sourcing into a comprehensive recruiting CRM platform with their hireEZ 2 launch, providing integrated sourcing, engagement campaigns, analytics, and automation capabilities designed specifically for outbound recruiting workflows and talent relationship management.
Technology That Actually Understands Context
SeekOut’s differentiation lies in what Vishwanath calls “semantic intelligence” the ability to understand what candidates have accomplished rather than just matching keywords. Their system draws from over a billion profiles across platforms including LinkedIn, GitHub, research publications, and patents to build unified candidate profiles.
The technology stack includes several key innovations:
- Unified Intelligence Layer: Aggregates data from multiple sources (LinkedIn, GitHub, company alumni databases, past applications) to create comprehensive candidate profiles that reveal capabilities beyond traditional resume scanning.
- Semantic Search Capabilities: Uses context-aware AI to identify candidates whose accomplishments match job requirements even when they don’t use standard industry terminology, uncovering passive talent that keyword-based tools miss.
- Agentic AI Workflow: Deploys multiple specialized AI agents that handle different aspects of the recruiting process from initial sourcing and filtering to personalized outreach messaging and preliminary screening working together in a coordinated system.
This sophisticated approach to combining AI capabilities with human expertise reflects the kind of innovation we recognize through our HCM Excellence Awards®, where leading organizations demonstrate measurable results from technology-enabled talent acquisition transformations.
The “SeekOut Spot” service combines these AI agents with expert recruiters hired from companies like Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft. These recruiters handle the nuanced human aspects of candidate evaluation while the AI agents manage the volume-intensive tasks.
Who Benefits Most from AI-Powered Recruiting Services
Based on our conversation and market analysis, several organization types emerge as ideal candidates for this approach:
- Post-Hiring Freeze Enterprises: Companies ramping up from hiring freezes who need to scale quickly without proportionally increasing their recruiting team size, particularly those facing critical skill shortages in technical roles
- High-Growth Technology Companies: Organizations hiring for specialized technical roles where passive candidates often don’t maintain active LinkedIn profiles but demonstrate their capabilities through GitHub contributions, research publications, or patent filings.
- Diversity-Focused Organizations: Companies with aggressive diversity hiring goals that struggle to identify underrepresented candidates through traditional channels, leveraging SeekOut’s ability to surface talent from non-obvious sources.
- Volume Hiring with Quality Requirements: Enterprises that need to process hundreds of applications per role while maintaining high-quality hiring standards, particularly in competitive markets where top talent receives multiple offers.
- Resource-Constrained Recruiting Teams: Organizations with lean talent acquisition teams who need to “punch above their weight” in terms of hiring volume and candidate quality, especially those competing against companies with larger recruiting budgets.
Analyst Perspective: The Future of Recruiting is Human-AI Partnership
SeekOut represents a significant evolution in how we think about recruiting automation. Rather than replacing recruiters, the platform amplifies their capabilities by handling the 80% of top-funnel activities that don’t require human judgment while freeing recruiters to focus on relationship-building and cultural fit assessment.
The economics are compelling. Vishwanath shared that they’re seeing six-figure annual contracts with companies as small as 1,000 employees, suggesting strong ROI potential when the alternative is hiring additional full-time recruiters or missing critical hires due to capacity constraints.
Our research team frequently collaborates with solution providers on thought leadership initiatives that advance industry understanding, and SeekOut’s approach aligns with broader trends we’re seeing toward “augmented intelligence” rather than full automation. The most successful AI recruiting tools enhance human decision-making rather than attempting to replace it entirely.
Through the Brandon Hall Group Institute™, our members have access to research and certification programs and thought leadership ithat advance industry understanding of AI-enabled recruiting and other aspects of HR.
However, success will depend heavily on execution. The market is littered with recruiting tools that promised revolutionary outcomes but failed to deliver measurable results. SeekOut’s focus on pilot programs and measurable metrics (time-to-hire, application-to-qualified-candidate ratios, final hiring success rates) suggests they understand the importance of proving value before scaling.
Strategic Implications for Talent Leaders
The emergence of agentic AI in recruiting signals a fundamental shift in how talent acquisition teams should think about their role and structure. Organizations that adapt their recruiting strategies to leverage AI agents while investing in human recruiters’ relationship-building and strategic advising capabilities will gain significant competitive advantages.
For talent leaders evaluating solutions like SeekOut Spot, the key question isn’t whether AI can improve recruiting efficiency it’s whether your organization is ready to reimagine the recruiter’s role. The companies that succeed will be those that view AI as a force multiplier for human expertise rather than a replacement for human judgment.
Talent leaders looking to deepen their understanding of how agentic AI fits within broader talent acquisition strategies can explore these topics further at the HCM Excellence Conference®, where practitioners and solution providers share real-world implementation experiences and measurable outcomes.
As the talent market continues to evolve, the organizations that combine sophisticated AI capabilities with deep human expertise will capture the best talent while their competitors struggle with the limitations of purely manual or purely automated approaches. The future of recruiting isn’t human versus machine it’s human with machine, working in partnership to solve problems neither could tackle alone.
