Skip to main content

SeekOut Recruit 101 | Getting Started Guide

Learn the basics of SeekOut Recruit with step-by-step guides, videos, and tips to find, organize, and connect with top talent.

T
Written by Tirlochan Arora
Updated this week

Welcome to SeekOut Recruit 101

This guide will walk you step-by-step through the essential features of SeekOut Recruit, from logging in for the first time to finding, organizing, and connecting with top talent. Whether you’re brand new to SeekOut or just need a refresher, this is the perfect place to start.

Each topic is organized into a drop-down section. Simply click the title to expand and read the content, watch the tutorial video, or follow along with the instructions. You can move through the guide in order or jump straight to the section you’re most interested in.

By the end of Recruit 101, you’ll know how to:

  • Navigate your dashboard and main tools

  • Run powerful searches using Smart Match

  • Read and interpret candidate profiles

  • Apply diversity filters

  • Save and organize candidates into projects

  • Find and use contact information

  • Export and share your work with others

  • Get help when you need it

When you’re ready, continue on to SeekOut Recruit 201 to unlock even more advanced sourcing strategies and tools.


What is SeekOut?

SeekOut is a powerful platform for sourcers and recruiters to discover passive and untapped talent. With advanced filters, market insights, and direct messaging, you can identify hard-to-reach candidates and fill roles more strategically.

Logging In

Sign in to your account by visiting app.seekout.io/login. Enter your email address and password, then click sign in.

If your organization uses SSO to sign in to apps, click the link that reads Sign in With SSO.

Learn how to sign into your SeekOut account in this brief tutorial.

The SeekOut Dashboard

When you sign in to SeekOut, you’ll land on your Home Dashboard. It’s your central hub to view recent searches, track sourcing activity, and check your monthly contact and export credits—plus access shortcuts to start new searches or explore candidate insights.

No matter where you are in SeekOut, the left-hand menu is always available so you can quickly navigate between Home, Search, Projects, and other tools in your subscription.

A Search Using Smart Match

Smart Match is a powerful, guided sourcing tool in SeekOut that helps you quickly uncover the most relevant, hard-to-find candidates—fast. Just enter a job title along with your required and preferred skills, and Smart Match will instantly analyze your criteria to surface top matches. You can further refine results using filters like location, diversity, education, and years of experience, making it easy to focus on the candidates who best fit your needs.

In this video, you’ll see how to set up a Smart Match search, interpret full and partial matches, and use profile insights to identify the strongest prospects for your open roles.

Note: To access Smart Match, click Search in the left-hand navigation. Then either enter your details in the "Who are you looking for?" field or open the Smart Match tab within the Public Profiles talent pool.

Reading a SeekOut Profile

SeekOut profiles bring together key candidate information—from current and past roles, companies, and locations to skills, education, and public GitHub or publication data. Profiles may also include links to LinkedIn, GitHub, or other social accounts, plus contact details when available.

In this tutorial, we’ll walk through how to navigate each section of a candidate profile and use action buttons for tasks like adding candidates to projects. You’ll also see where experience, education, skills, GitHub contributions, and publications appear, depending on your license type, so you can make the most of every profile you view.

Diversity Tags

SeekOut’s diversity filters make it easier to identify candidates from underrepresented groups and support your diversity hiring goals. With a single click, you can filter for candidates who are women, Black/African American, Asian, Hispanic, veterans, and more—helping you expand your talent pool and reduce the time spent using traditional diversity sourcing methods.

In this tutorial, you’ll learn how SeekOut infers diversity data, how to apply one or multiple diversity filters, and how to interpret your results so you can recruit more inclusively and effectively.

Adding Talent to Projects


Once you’ve found promising candidates, adding them to a project helps you stay organized and track their progress through the hiring process. Projects act like folders where you can group candidates for specific roles, hiring managers, or pipelines. From there, you can export candidate data, update statuses and tags, add notes, or start outreach using SeekOut’s built-in messaging tools.

In this tutorial, you’ll learn the different ways to add candidates to projects—from individual profiles or search results—and how to manage your projects to keep your recruiting workflow efficient and collaborative.

Contact Info and Contact Credits

SeekOut makes it easy to connect with candidates by providing email addresses and phone numbers from trusted data partners—so you have more ways to reach out. Each time you retrieve an email or phone number, you’ll use a contact credit, helping you manage outreach while tracking your credit balance.

In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to check your available credits, retrieve contact details for one or multiple candidates at once, and use a multi-channel approach (email, phone, social links) to improve your chances of connecting. We’ll also cover how credits are used, when they’re not deducted, and how to report incorrect information.

Exporting and Sharing Projects

Once you’ve added candidates to a project, SeekOut makes it easy to either export their data to a spreadsheet or share the project directly with others. You can collaborate with hiring managers, recruiters, or stakeholders—even if they don’t have a SeekOut license—by choosing the sharing method that works best for your workflow.

In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to:

  • Export candidate data to Excel for offline review or tracking

  • Share projects securely with licensed and non-licensed users

  • Set viewing, commenting, or editing permissions

  • Use Bias Reducer mode to hide identifying details when sharing

By the end, you’ll know exactly how to get candidate data into the right hands while keeping control over what information is visible.

How to Get Help

SeekOut offers plenty of ways to get help—whether you need quick answers, hands-on troubleshooting, or deeper feature guidance. You can reach out anytime through our live support chat (powered by real humans), email us at [email protected], or connect with your CSM.

Our Support team also hosts 20-minute live 1:1 office hours Monday–Friday for individual troubleshooting, feature walkthroughs, and quick Q&A. Just ask a chat support agent for the booking link!


What’s Next?


Congrats on completing SeekOut Recruit 101! You’ve learned the essentials, but there’s still so much more you can do with SeekOut to power your recruiting success. Ready to take the next step? Jump into SeekOut Recruit 201.


Did this answer your question?