AI will automate research, market mapping, note-taking, reporting and large parts of candidate identification.
Relationships, judgment and persuasion remain the valuable work in senior search.
This is slightly awkward for the recruitment industry.
A lot of firms have spent years charging clients for access to names.
Take a brief.
Search a database.
Produce a longlist.
Send some messages.
Present the people who reply.
AI can now complete a large amount of that work in hours.
Good.
Clients should expect faster research and better information.
They should also become much harder to impress with a list of people they could have found themselves.
A profile only tells you what has already happened
LinkedIn can tell you that someone spent five years at R/GA, three years at Nike and now leads creative at a fast-growing technology company.
AI can compare that history against a hundred other profiles.
It can identify patterns and suggest adjacent talent pools.
It still has limited access to the current human reality.
Is the person happy?
Do they trust their CEO?
Has their promised promotion disappeared again?
Would they move for a smaller salary and greater autonomy?
Does their partner have a career that makes relocation difficult?
Did they build the brilliant department on their profile, or inherit it six months before the awards arrived?
You learn those things through proper relationships.
Senior people rarely apply at the perfect moment
A great CCO may be happy enough.
They earn well.
Their team likes them.
Their current company has promised them something interesting.
Then the right opportunity appears.
The role gives them more freedom.
The CEO's ambition connects with theirs.
The company has a problem they would enjoy solving.
Now you have a conversation.
Getting them from mild curiosity to a signed contract takes trust.
You have to understand what they're leaving, what they're risking and what needs to be true for the move to make sense.
Sometimes the right advice is to stay where they are.
That honesty is part of why they take your call three years later.
AI makes the relationships more useful
UNKNOWN has 20 consultants having around 1,000 conversations every month across the creative economy.
We hear which leaders are frustrated.
Which capabilities clients keep requesting.
Which founders are thinking about selling.
Which companies are growing quietly.
Which impressive person would cause absolute carnage inside the wrong culture.
That information used to live inside individual brains, notebooks and forgotten CRM notes.
So, we built Brian.
Someone misspelt THE BRAIN and the name stuck. Also, have you ever met a Brian who wasn't razor sharp? I'll wait.
Brian helps us connect the information.
A conversation about an unhappy strategy leader becomes relevant when a client starts planning a new capability six months later.
Five conversations about the same client problem start to reveal an area of the market that's growing.
The technology improves out memory and our ability to spot patterns.
The conversation still creates the information.
Clients should ask better questions
A senior search partner should be able to answer:
- Which part of our brief will reduce the quality of the shortlist?
- Who appears right on paper but would struggle here?
- What does the market think about our company?
- Which people can you reach that we can't?
- What would prevent the best candidate accepting?
- What are you hearing that hasn't become public yet?
Those answers come from market knowledge and judgment.
The search should also move faster now.
Research shouldn't disappear into a six-week black hole.
Reporting should be clear.
Obvious candidates should be mapped immediately.
Technology has raised the expected standard.
That is healthy.
AI will remove a lot of recruitment work.
It will probably remove a lot of recruiters too.
The firms that remain will know their markets deeply, challenge bad briefs and have trusted relationships with people who can change the direction of a company.
Finding a plausible name is getting very easy.
Knowing the right human, at the right moment, for this specific business remains hard.
UNKNOWN conducts executive search for creative agencies, brands, and investors globally. We use technology to make our network more intelligent and our work faster. The thousand human conversations each month remain the important bit.
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