Written by Rosemary Baylis-West, Principal Consultant, GatenbySanderson

In a recent editorial the Guardian noted that “used in the right way, new technologies can play their part in opening up possibilities for applicants rather than simply screening them out with minimal explanation or feedback.”

Since the technology matured in 2022, many of us in the industry have worked with AI to support candidates and clients to understand each other better before an offer of employment is made. AI promises a fourth industrial revolution; it can certainly help us go further in strengthening human judgement and connection in executive search.

Due diligence is increasingly high on our clients’ priority lists. Working with AI helps us to test claims made by candidates in their application paperwork and other published material, including role title and scope, dates roles have been held, records of achievement and impact in role. Proprietary AI models, and increasingly generalised frontier models, can produce results across a range of indicators, supporting basic due diligence against historical records, public information and the internal and external consistency of candidates’ application documents and published work. AI can now support human judgement in more sophisticated ways to highlight unsupported assertions, indicators of potential embellishment and implausible claims, drawing on a vast pool of publicly available and proprietary data. This enables executive search consultants who make intelligent use of AI to have a richer and more supportive dialogue with candidates. Where human checks took considerable time and were fallible, a well-trained and prompted large language model can produce generally accurate, verifiable results in a fraction of the time. Hallucination of false records was a concern with previous generations of models, but the capability of frontier models is increasing by an order of magnitude every 12 to 18 months. State-of-the-art models now hallucinate in just 1% to 7% of all cases. Meetings start from the point that, whilst there may be questions or even red flags to explore, there is more time available for human touch and judgement if AI has helped us with pre-checks.

Turning to applications, we should be comfortable supporting and encouraging candidates to make use of models to support their own research, creativity, and strategic thinking. In the coming months, it will be increasingly appropriate to think of agents running on the most capable models not simply as tools but as collaborators. We should expect these digital advisers to support more insightful and valuable dialogues between candidate, consultant, and client. For example, candidates and consultants can apply models to surface assumptions and blind spots that a candidate may have, to explore them and develop actionable insights for their thinking and leadership. Candidates can use the conversational features of AI applications to explore their ‘fit’ with prospective employers. Many candidates find it difficult to tell the story of their careers, whether they are just starting out or there is too much history to distil into a compelling statement; large language models are designed for pattern matching, making them especially well-suited to supporting candidates in this task. Far from the cliché of using AI to pump out boilerplate answers for applications, we can help candidates to use models to analyse their experiences and connect them; and to help with general recall.

We should not be afraid of allowing candidates to use AI during assessments. Given the potential of the technology to increase the productivity of junior and senior executives alike, the best assessment processes are already testing how candidates deploy AI to analyse information and support strategic decision-making. The strongest candidates will use AI thoughtfully to draw insights from large datasets on financial performance, organisational priorities, market position and sector trends. They will use it to explore patterns. They are then able to bring human judgement and instinct on what matters, both for them and their leadership, and for the organisation and its potential. Recently in an appointment process, we used a simulation involving complex financial data. Candidates were invited to come to the interview with 10 minutes of reflections, focused particularly on the trade-offs to be considered. As part of this, they were invited to describe to the panel how they had used AI to prepare their analysis and reflections. A particularly strong candidate answer described how AI had challenged them with alternative perspectives, which had led them to some wider research on ethical leadership in the simulation’s context. The quality of candidate dialogue with the panel was enhanced because it was much closer to real life interaction than traditional Q&A would have been. It was also enhanced because there was transparency on the use of AI in preparing for it.

At GS, we advocate strongly for the role that AI can play in supporting the search industry in bringing candidates and clients together. If you are interested to find out more, please contact us.