2026 June- ESIX Research Roundtable
Corporate exec recruiting Research & Talent Intelligence teams are moving towards more of an advisory role and away from traditional manual research, mostly thanks to AI, and the function's future might look more like business consulting than recruiting.
Our quarterly ESIX: Executive Search Information Exchange Research Roundtable discussion focused on "Using Talent Intelligence to Shape Pipelines and Decisions," and featured the outstanding experts Alycia Holder from Cisco & Mary Beth Armstrong from Vanguard. We naturally talked about tools and AI, though there were warnings about validating accuracy, as well as stories of pushback from executives about the use of AI. We discussed more advanced use cases such as location-based talent mapping, org design analysis, & deeper competitive intelligence, and participants shared experiences with various tools, discussing their effectiveness for different role levels and organizational structures. We even touched on the future of the function, and as AI tools improve and learn, how it might be more akin to business strategy consulting than a pure recruitment function.
All in all, a very comprehensive and fascinating discussion!