As the General Manager of ISG-Americas®, I want to shed light on the darkness and clear up the AI “blind flight”, or, more diplomatically, the AI paradox. The fact is, AI is not the healing savior of humanity and is not capable of performing true miracles, so to speak. Not in the current state of market confusion. Not in this psychological, cloud-covered “condensation of things”, I would say. Further fact is, everyone talks about AI in recruiting, and many idolize it and hope that AI technology will change their lives, often away from frustration, resignation, and stagnation – toward greater prosperity and a sense of well-being.
The reality is, everyone wants to sell you AI right now, and the sad thing is that this fallacy works, at least in most cases. I would like to state right at the start that I am by no means anti-technology and certainly appreciate and want to acknowledge the advantages of AI. So this isn’t about a kind of reckoning with the system, but rather about a diversified perspective, because at the moment I can’t stand the fact that everyone is talking so highly about AI without ever having properly used this technology.
A horde of self-proclaimed “would-be” AI experts, so to speak. Now be honest with yourself: are you an expert on the subject of AI? Most people don’t even know how to use tools like ChatGPT, as long as it’s sexy, seductive, and modern. Most companies are trying to sell us services that supposedly optimize our business using AI. The reality is that most of these tools describe business optimization tools, which are primarily about better interpreting one’s own company data and, in a wider sense, increasing business efficiency through data analytics. That’s fundamentally very pleasing and desirable, but by no means innovative! Business intelligence tools and optimization programs have been around for what feels like forever.
Rather, this is a clumsy and bold attempt to use the name AI as a sales tool to deliberately mislead low-hanging fruit clients with one’s own commercialization ideas. The main thing is that it sounds good, so the name should be chosen as the program, as always. We had that in the Middle Ages, too. So much so, so good.
The really great thing about AI is that it saves us real operational and administrative time by completing processes that humans could never, even remotely, perform in the same amount of time. So, in a way, it’s truly a miracle. Yes, to save time and yes, and to become more efficient. It supports you in your daily workflows as a support tool, so to speak, but is it also the golden grail solution? No, and for heaven’s sake, definitely not. How could we have allowed ourselves to be so blinded by AI?
The fact is, that AI technology is in its infancy, and no one can truly predict where it will all lead. This thing isn’t fully developed yet, and anyone who denies this or “idolizes” the technology is inherently an idealist. In recruiting, executive search, and my daily work, AI supports me in collecting, evaluating, and possibly interpreting vast amounts of data. So, it’s primarily about a selective selection criterion and a first attempt at pre-selection.
Recruiting, and especially executive search at the management level, is about much more than that. My last project in the US consisted of nine interview rounds and lasted 3.5 months. Now, AI can help me review and screen hundreds or even thousands of resumes for qualifications in only milliseconds.
Or another example: it definitely helps me save time because the program now modifies my job description by comparing the requirements with the availability of this quality on the market in real time. So, it’s about the eternal human discrepancy between “supply and demand”, and as with all optimization efforts in life, it’s ultimately about the idealistic endeavor to create harmony between aspects that often couldn’t be more different, as namely “supply and demand”.
As soon as you work with top-level executives at a personal coaching level and want to demonstrate this quality over a longer, defined period, the consultant’s consultative and bespoken approach as a sparring partner is in demand.
In my last 34 years of professional management experience, including 17 years in executive search and HR-management, I have managed and orchestrated countless consulting projects and have repeatedly discovered how important it is to maintain core competencies throughout the entire project and to ensure that candidates don’t back out but remain loyal to me.
A three-month project duration can feel like an eternity, and if you, as a consultant with your entire reputation and core competencies, fail to not only build continuity and stability throughout the entire process but also sustainably maintain it, then you’re lost. My clients don’t pay me because we’re so good at sales, or marketing, or the initial selection, the “identification” of candidates. These may well be important facts, but our success is project management and service delivery.
Not sales or research, but the project and people management expertise that builds on them. Namely, having the ability, from this broader basis, to define a project course in which the candidate feels more or less at home. Why should a CEO want to listen to me patiently for three months, or even accompany me? The added value here lies in the human element. AI is not the solution to everything. That would be utterly ignorant.
AI is more about the correct use of modern time-saving technologies and then having time for what’s important, namely building customer relationships! The dedication to the customer, their appreciation, and mutual engagement with the actual core matter. What good is the most beautiful house if the rooms are poorly divided and all the furnishings and flooring are forgotten, and you have to tear it all out again?
Please, as a society, let’s stop worrying only about superficial details and finally step outside the realm of the core approach and ask ourselves what constitutes a good consulting approach and what the added value is for the customer. AI is partly responsible for the current imbalance in the markets, as it’s more about creating distraction, diversion, and distorted presentations than ever before.
Now, recruiters are sending out 10,000 emails a day, not 5,000, and AI is also sending its low-hanging fruit messages all over the world. You could say, the poor HR vice presidents. Not only is HR the wrong decision-maker for our sales, but every day thousands of HR people receive unqualified emails from HR consultants because they’re firmly convinced they have to play the holy Jesus. HR rarely makes our purchasing decisions. Executive search Powerhouses around the world should stop to attack HR-departments, as they are not representing their true decision makers in sales, and blame them for their own shortcomings and limitations as consultants.
If we as external recruiting consultants address the right target group, we’ll finally do our homework as core players in the global economy and business. Imagine you want to sell fish food and go to a horse farm with it. Completely out of place, I would say.
But now the majority of corporate HR-people are also receiving mail from AI. Thousands of automated emails from AI are sent to target groups without consideration for friction or losses. Consultants who, after 5,000 unsuccessful attempts, in a kind of fit of excess, now increase the speed again and send out 10,000 emails instead of 5,000, hoping to get different, better answers.
How impoverished a society is, and you can’t blame AI for that! How impoverished a society of consultants must be that thinks it’s doing the right thing by sending random messages to companies, at an extremely high rate, without any filtering function. HR consulting isn’t an email messaging service or an order-taking service, right? What constitutes successful and high-quality consulting?
That’s the question here. Certainly not AI per se, but we mean “empathy-centered but AI assisted.” The human factor, not the computer, the machine alone. Or to put it in medical terms: In “Computer-assisted surgery”, the computer assists, and does not entirely take over! Something to think about.
Successful HR consulting helps companies stop this madness and nonsense, and the currently prevailing confusion in the markets triggered by an email frenzy, and shed light on the darkness by understanding the true added value of AI, applying it, but then acting with human competence and building trust. This is our opportunity.
Our profession as headhunters and executive recruiters isn’t dying out, AI isn’t everything, but rather people are making decisions and skillfully using a technology that is only just beginning to develop. Then, and only then, can we as consultants offer customers serious added value.
As a human filter function in a mass email market that is pushing all boundaries and holding back nothing. This human filter function, in turn, would be a service that the customer could certainly understand and buy. Not “no” or “yes,” but “no” and “yes” at the same time, filtering, measuring, evaluating, and making the customer’s work easier.
The fact is that AI isn’t the key to the solution, but often the root cause of the problem. Now that we have it, let’s use it intelligently!
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