Anoop Gupta is the co-founder and CEO of SeekOut, a recruitment tool that empowers companies to go beyond LinkedIn when searching for hard-to-find and diverse talent. But that’s not all he’s done.
Prior to SeekOut, Anoop spent 18 years at Microsoft where he was a Distinguished Scientist in Microsoft Research and directly reported to Bill Gates as his technology advisor. He headed enterprise communications products (Exchange, Skype) as Corporate Vice President (CVP) of Unified Communications and was CVP for Global Technology Policy for Microsoft.
Anoop was also a tenured professor of Computer Science at Stanford, where he founded one of the earliest companies in streaming media that was acquired by Microsoft in 1997. He has a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie-Mellon University, holds over 85 issued US patents, and has authored 100+ published research papers. What can’t he do?
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
- Anoop’s background and why he founded SeekOut.
- Anoop talks about his recruitment tool/software and how it distinguishes itself from the rest of the market.
- The power of AI in talent search and how SeekOut helps with diversity and inclusion.
- Anoop talks about his experience and philosophies in building teams in his current role and past roles.
- Anoop’s candidate interview process and how he finds candidate’s soft skills.
- What AI can and can’t do.
- Why recruiters need to take an active role in recruitment despite using AI.
- Anoop’s advice to early stage founders and recruiters in building teams and partnering with recruitment agencies.
- Where to learn more about Anoop Gupta and his product.
In this episode…
In today’s digital era, data and data analytics are very crucial in the recruitment process. Artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming more popular and there are many recruitment tools in the market designed to help recruiters find the best candidates for their companies. However, there are things AI can and can’t do: enter, human intervention.
In this week’s episode of Elevate Hire, Greg Toroosian interviews Anoop Gupta about his artificial intelligence (AI) tool for quality recruitment, SeekOut. SeekOut’s comprehensive database of whole person profiles, intuitive AI search, and personalized messaging gives companies the ability to find, engage, and hire in-demand professionals faster.
Together, they talk about the power of AI as well as its limitations, Anoop’s philosophies in building teams, and how his recruitment tool works. Stay tuned.
Resources Mentioned in this episode
- Elevate Hire
- SeekOut
- Anoop Gupta’s email: anoop@seekout.io
- Anoop Gupta on LinkedIn
- GitHub
- Netscape
- Satya Nadella
- Hadoop
Sponsor for this episode…
This episode is brought to you by Elevate Hire, a talent acquisition firm which provides leadership and senior level recruiting services for early-stage companies. Elevate Hire also offers advisory and consultancy services for select clients.
Elevate Hire was founded by Greg Toroosian after more than a decade in the Talent Acquisition space, working with startups, globally recognized brands and recruiting agencies, because I found that too many early-stage companies were struggling to recruit and retain top talent during crucial times of growth.
Because recruitment and talent retainment are keys to having a successful company in today’s fast-paced economy, Elevate Hire is committed to helping you recruit the right top tier talent, at the right time, can differentiate the most successful companies from the rest of their field.
If your company needs assistance with talent search, hiring process improvements, choosing and implementing recruiting tools, team training, or if you’re in need of an advisor, get in touch with us today to find out how we can make this work so that you can start building the company of your dreams.
Click this link to learn more about us and the services that we can provide for you and your company.
Episode Transcript
Intro
Welcome to the Elevate Hire podcast where CEOs founders and executives of early stage companies talk through their experiences of building teams.
Greg Toroosian
Greg Toroosian here, Founder of Elevate Hire and host of the Elevate Hire podcast where I talk to CEOs, founders and executives about the challenges and successes they’ve had while recruiting for their teams. This episode is actually brought to you by Elevate Hire a talent acquisition advisory, consultancy and execution firm to provide leadership and senior level recruiting services to early stage and rapidly growing companies. We believe that recruiting and retaining talent is key to having a successful company. In today’s fast moving economy being able to recruit the top tier talent at the right time can differentiate most successful companies from the rest of their field. If your company needs assistance in talent search, hiring process improvements, choosing and implementing recruiting tools, team training or if you’re in need of an advisor we can help. For more details visit elevatehire.com.
In this episode, we are lucky to have Anoop Gupta, co-founder and CEO of SeekOut. Anoop has a really interesting background including being a distinguished scientist at Microsoft and reporting directly to Bill Gates. I’m excited to dive in here because not only does he have experience of building teams and a company. SeekOut is an AI and machine learning recruiting tool built to give users a competitive edge. Welcome Anoop. Thanks for being on the show.
Anoop Gupta 1:28
Thank you, Greg. Exciting to be here.
Greg Toroosian 1:30
Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. I know it’s taking us a while to pin this down. But like I said, I’m super excited to jump in here. Good stuff. So first, before we jump in, I know I gave a brief overview there, but can you give the listeners a bit more information about yourself and your experience and how you actually ended up founding SeekOut? Where did the idea come from?
Anoop Gupta 1:49
No, sure, sure. So, you know, I’m a geek, info, innovator. I’m a Product builder. So little bit more color. The background that you gave. So I got my PhD from Carnegie Mellon. I was a professor at Stanford. I did the first streaming media company. My first startup was a streaming media company. You know, in the early days when there were still 56 k modems. Each scenario was online learning for Stanford. That v dad and that was acquired by Microsoft in July 97. Very cool. That’s how I moved to Seattle. And I then I spent 18 years with Microsoft. I spent some time with Microsoft Research. I directly reported to Bill Gates, you know, and then the first sort of more business side I think, was I ran Skype in exchange. So with unified communications, Skype, all that thing. I had the fortune of being the founding corporate Vice President for that and leading it then I had a global tech policy, a lot of research in telepresence, And then, you know, three, four years ago decided to quit with a close friend of mine to get again on the startup journey. So he said, it’s another startup left inside of me. And I got to do it’s actually the, you know, a little bit of context for people who might be thinking of large companies like some extremely good, to me, and I learned a tremendous amount. But for me thinking about it, right, the question was, large companies have a small number of focuses. So you know, Microsoft Office, we do Xbox, we do the cloud, but I was seeing outside Airbnb ease and lots of innovation happening. And so I said, I want to get on a mountain bike instead of innovating in a team over there and we were blessed. So, you know, that’s how we started and my co-founder was one of the main movers and shakers behind the Bing search engine. The problem that we address with sicario, you know, has a deep motivation. I’m a workaholic.
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