An Important Message from SeekOut: Sharing Our Commitment to Responsible & Ethical AI Usage

SeekOut’s mission from the very beginning has been to enable organizations and people to dream bigger, perform better, and grow together. Our talent solutions enable and foster workplace opportunities, including through our groundbreaking SeekOut Recruit solution for talent acquisition and innovative SeekOut Grow product for talent management. 

The recruiting and talent space is an area where historically underrepresented groups often fall behind or are overlooked due to unintended bias. Much of our success has come from our early and continuing focus on enabling our customers to source diverse talent, including through the use of objective criteria such as job qualifications and skills. We have also empowered companies to specifically bring historically underrepresented talent into their hiring pipelines. 

Because SeekOut is an important partner in our customers’ talent acquisition and management processes, we have always taken the responsibility of operating ethically and transparently very seriously. Being thoughtful about the impact of our tools is critical to how we build and deploy all of our products and is especially important in any talent system that contains artificial intelligence or machine learning programs. 

As we enter a period of rapid technological transformation and exponential innovation in artificial intelligence capabilities and applications, we are committed to ensuring that these artificial intelligence and machine learning systems are responsibly implemented at SeekOut. In 2021 we aligned on our first Ethical AI statement, which has since grown into the comprehensive SeekOut Responsible AI Program that exists today. 

SeekOut’s Responsible AI Council

This important and ongoing initiative begins with the SeekOut Responsible AI Council, a standing internal committee at SeekOut that is charged with supervising and administering our broader Responsible AI Program. The Council serves as the lynchpin of our Responsible AI Program. 

Our Responsible AI Council includes leaders from our product, legal, engineering, customer success, and diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging teams. This broad representation ensures that stakeholders with a variety of perspectives are included and committed to this crucial undertaking. The Council works collaboratively across all levels of SeekOut to ensure the effectiveness of our Responsible AI Program and reports on the effectiveness of our AI control systems to both our senior leadership team and Board of Directors.

Our Responsible AI Principles

Over the last several months the Council has created and implemented our Responsible AI Principles, which we are sharing publicly for the first time today. These principles and our Responsible AI Program have been critical in guiding our design and implementation of significant new AI talent capabilities across our platform, including SeekOut Assist.

SeekOut follows seven core principles to ensure the responsible use of AI in our offerings: 

1. Build human-driven, AI-assisted technology

AI augments but does not replace human decision-making. Keeping the human at the center of decisions minimizes the potential for unintended (and undetected) outcomes. For example, our AI systems will never make employment decisions.

2. Operate with transparency

Our AI capabilities assist in discovering and growing talent. We document how our AI functions and disclose its use in our offerings. 

3. Use AI to advance diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging

SeekOut builds AI capabilities that advance inclusion of underrepresented populations and reduces economic, social, gender, and other inequalities. 

4. Test internally and validate externally

We consistently validate that our AI program reflects and advances industry best practices by conducting internal testing, engaging in external auditing, and partnering with outside experts. We actively contribute to a broader effort to ensure responsible AI use in our industry. 

5. Design AI to prevent harm and respect individual interests 

We will assess the potential impact of our AI systems on the interests and rights of individuals. To prevent the potential for unintended harm, we take additional protective steps when building new AI capabilities.

6. Create shared accountability 

Everyone at SeekOut has an important role to play in ensuring that our AI systems are used responsibly. SeekOut encourages all employees and customers to contribute to the continuous improvement of AI capabilities and to monitor for potential or unintended bias.

7. Control by design 

Individuals have a fundamental right to protect the use of personal data. We provide customers and individuals mechanisms to understand and control the data that is leveraged by SeekOut’s AI systems. 

Our broader commitment to responsible AI

SeekOut’s promise is that we will follow the above core principles to ensure the responsible use of AI in our offerings. We also recognize that responsibility in talent acquisition and management systems is bigger than SeekOut. We encourage any company operating in talent acquisition or management to carefully consider their own AI systems and implement similar control systems and principles. Together we can ensure that AI systems are designed, implemented, and used in a responsible manner.  

SeekOut is a member of the Responsible AI Institute, a member of the TechNet Council, and has performed a third party AI bias audit with Credo AI.

Learn more about SeekOut Assist and our recruiting and talent management solutions.