How to Use SeekOut Workspaces
Our newest search capability in Recruit, built with AI to guide your sourcing and hiring process.
Table of contents
What is SeekOut Workspaces?
SeekOut Workspaces is an AI-powered workflow that guides you across discovering, evaluating, and engaging candidates. Workspaces speeds up your hiring process, helps you identify best-fit talent faster, and enables your teams to scale recruiting best practices with ease.
Who has access to Workspaces?
Workspaces is available to all SeekOut customers with paid licenses. It's included at no extra cost with your paid SeekOut subscription.
Benefits and key features of Workspaces to your hiring process
Workspaces guides you through the sourcing and hiring process with intuitive workflows that let you efficiently discover and engage talent across the most important talent pools, ensuring you never miss qualified candidates.
Stay organized. Workspaces collects your search, shortlist, and engagement activity for each role in one place, making it easier to collaborate and stay organized around hiring the best-fit candidate.
Guided setup wizard. A simple, step-by-step process helps you define your search criteria and role requirements up front, ensuring your talent search is focused from the start.
Job description matching. Instantly surface top-matching profiles across multiple channels by analyzing your job description.
Scorecards. Easily evaluate and compare profiles using a customizable scorecard—establish your must-have criteria and remove the guesswork from profile assessments.
Recommended profiles. Get smart, targeted profiles recommendations so you can build your shortlist faster and never miss a hidden gem.
Personalized email campaigns. Effortlessly create tailored outreach sequences to boost response rates and meaningfully engage different talent pools.
Getting started with Workspaces
Step 1: Set up your search and validate evaluation criteria
Workspaces’s AI-guided workflow will help you set up a successful search, instantly showing you what it understands about the role. It relies on you to confirm its accuracy and adjust as needed.
Go to Workspaces in the left sidebar of your dashboard.
Click on the Create New button in the right-hand corner of the screen, and click on the Start Setup button in the next pop-up window.
Tip: Read through the text in each pop-up. This guidance is designed to help you think deeply about the role you’re searching for and increase the likelihood of finding the right candidate.
Select one of three ways to start your search:
Pull a role from your ATS. Requires ATS integration.
Paste a job description. If you select this option, keep in mind that your experience won’t be linked to the role in your ATS if you have an integration. This means you won’t have access to Pipeline stats (more on this later in this article).
Describe the ideal candidate. Describe the candidate you’re looking for as if you were talking to a colleague.
After inputting the job description, Workspaces will use AI to walk through a series of steps to refine and approve the details of the role, offering you criteria suggestions as a starting point that you are free to adjust. Step-by-step, you’ll be asked to:
Review the job description.
Select job titles.
Select two to four most important skills or experience.
Select any previous employers that suggest a good candidate fit.
Select education requirements (optional)
Select years of experience (optional)
Location requirements (optional)
Refine the search Workspaces creates
Set up your AI scorecard
Based on your input, Workspaces will pull five top criteria for the role and evaluate profiles against them. These criteria are set up as Yes or No questions, taken from your job description and questions you have answered throughout the search setup. You can edit these as you’d like.
Step 2: Refine your search and shortlist profiles
Start reviewing profiles across talent pools and shortlist as you go.
Adjust the criteria. Based on the initial results, adjust the search criteria on left manually or use SeekOut Assist at the top to refine using natural language.
Search across talent pools. Follow the highlighted tabs right above the search criteria to look through potential candidates across Public Profiles, Your ATS, Alumni (former employees), and more.
Shortlist profiles. As you find promising profiles, click on the Shortlist button to the right of each candidate profile or choose the thumbs down icon to remove a profile from your results.
When ready, click on the Evaluate tab.
Step 3: Evaluate
In this section of Workspaces, you’ll get help evaluating profiles against the scorecard you created in the search setup.
Profiles are shown in order of ranking.
To the left, you can filter through profiles by your scorecard criteria that you set at the beginning of your search. Each number in the Yes, Partially, or No boxes indicates how many candidates match that criteria.
Each profile has a numerical score. This indicates how strongly the candidate matches against your criteria.
To the right of the numerical score are the five scorecard criteria. Each will have a tag of Yes, Partially, or No indicating the profile match.
Tip: Hover over each tag for an explanation of how the profiles’ qualifications match your top criteria.
If you want to assess additional profiles, select the Get more recommendations button at the top of the screen. This will take a few minutes to generate.
Shortlist candidates as you identify the right matches.
Tip: You can add profiles to the Evaluation tab from the previous search tab. Select the three stacked dots to the right of the icons above the first profile, and select the option to run the Evaluation for select profiles or all results.
When ready, move to the Shortlist tab, next to Evaluate at the top of the screen.
Step 4: Review your shortlist
You’ll find a collection of your shortlisted candidates and their Outreach status (more about Outreach in Step 5).
If you’re integrated to your ATS, these statuses will update automatically. Otherwise, you can edit these manually.
Filter your view by:
Source
Status
Added by
Contact info
2. Fetch contact information. Navigate to the toolbar above the first profile to get the candidate’s phone number or email address individually or by bulk selection.
Note: SeekOut’s Usage Credits system has been updated for Workspaces AI-powered features:
AI credit allocation. You’ll get 10,000 AI Credits per month to use with Workspace features like Profile Evaluation and email generation, which should be more than enough for even power users.
AI-powered pricing. These features use advanced AI technology which incurs additional operational costs, requiring credits beyond the standard platform usage.
Credit notifications: Before running any evaluation, you'll see a notification showing how many credits the action will use and your remaining balance.
If you have any questions, please contact Customer Support.
Step 5: Create and run your Outreach Sequence to reach talent
This step in Workspaces is where you’ll contact candidates using Outreach Sequences. You’ll need to have your email connected to SeekOut to use this functionality. Follow the steps in this guide to set this up.
Outreach Sequences in Workspaces works similarly to the way it’s used across Recruit:
For a rundown on how to use Outreach, read through the guide How to Use Outreach: Best Practices When Cold Emailing Candidates
To learn more about Outreach Sequences, read A Quick Guide to Your Outreach Sequence Library.
There are a few changes we've made to Outreach Sequence when using it in Workspaces:
Each candidate is grouped by source so that Workspaces AI can generate more targeted messaging.
We have new AI email generation tooling that allows Workspaces to take a mix of recruiter input and information from the job description to build a highly tailored and effective engagement campaigns.
To create an Outreach Sequence:
Navigate to the purple Create Sequence button to the right of the screen.
Choose from the following
Create sequence with AI: You’ll get help from Workspaces to create tailored messages quickly.
Create new from scratch: Start a Sequence on your own without help from Workspaces AI
Sequences library: Select a Sequence you’ve saved to your Library to repurpose for this campaign.
Tip: Use the guides we provided at the beginning of this step to guide you through the last two options.
When selecting Create Sequence with AI:
A pop-up window will appear with directions on how to set up your messages. Choose from two options:
One Sequence for all. The same message will go out to everyone.
Unique Sequence for each candidate (This option will be available in a few weeks). This will take longer to generate emails but the messaging is more personal.
Follow the onscreen instructions to create and complete your Outreach Sequences. You’ll be prompted to review information about the:
Role
Company
Benefits or perks that make the role stand out
Sequence setting (signature, number of emails, delay period)
Preview the messages
Move to the Editor to make further adjustments and finalize.
As prospects reply, they’ll be added to your Candidates tab automatically (for ATS integrations). Otherwise, you can update each candidate's status manually to keep track of progress of messaging statistics.
If you’re connected to your ATS for the role, track your Pipeline in the final tab, next to Candidates.
Step 6: Track end-to-end pipeline
This tab gives your entire hiring team maximum visibility into candidate pipeline progress and enables strategic conversations about high-impact actions and next steps in the recruitment process.
Click on each tab to expand the list of candidates in each stage.
Hover over icons to learn more about each action.
A note to Org Admin users:
If your account is connected to your ATS, Workspaces will automatically pull any custom stages and map them to pre-built categories: Applied, Recruiter Screen, Hiring Manager review, Interviewing, Offered, Hired, Rejected. If you notice that a custom stage from your ATS is not mapped correctly to one of our pre-built stages, you can edit this manually:
Go to your profile name in the lower left corner of your dashboard
Select Stage mapping
In the pop-up window
On the right under "Activity" are your ATS’s stages
On the left under "Map to" are the Workspaces pre-built stages they are mapped to. Use the drop down menu in the this column to adjust any stages.
Step 7: Overview tab
Head over the Overview tab (the first tab), to see the role at a glance and get Recommended actions from Workspaces AI.
Talent pool. See a breakdown of how many profiles are currently available in the talent pool by source. This number will update as you refine your searches.
Outreach status. See your email campaign stats.
Recommended profiles. This list comes from the Evaluate tab if you used the functionally in your search. Click on the list to go to see details and shortlist.
You can also share the Workspace with your hiring team.
Navigate to the Add Participants icon at the top of the screen.
Add people by name or email manually or from the drop-down.
For more information about integrating your ATS to SeekOut: