AI Is Transforming Recruitment, But People Still Matter
Tony Moore
Managing Director & Co-Founder
There is no credible argument that artificial intelligence is irrelevant to recruitment. AI is already changing how candidates are identified, assessed and engaged. It can analyse large volumes of data, automate administrative work, improve market mapping and help search consultants reach the best candidates more quickly.
Recruitment firms that fail to embrace these capabilities risk being left behind.
But accepting the importance of AI does not mean accepting the more extreme prediction that technology will make recruiters or people-focused businesses generally obsolete. That’s what they said about LinkedIn in 2001.
A recent development in our industry provides compelling evidence of this. In June 2026, Korn Ferry announced an agreement to acquire AMS, one of the world’s leading recruitment process outsourcing and talent solutions companies, for approximately £850 million, or $1.1 billion. The combined organisation will employ more than 16,000 people and, according to Korn Ferry, place someone into a job approximately every 90 seconds.
This is particularly interesting because Korn Ferry is hardly resisting technological change. The firm has invested extensively in AI and developed numerous AI-enabled initiatives, platforms and tools across recruitment, assessment, organisational consulting and talent analytics.
Avinash Tiwari
Senior Vice President & Director
The conversation we had in Ginza last month has stayed with us, and one thread has kept coming up in our work since: talent, and what it actually takes to lead through this moment. Korn Ferry’s recent billion dollar acquisition of AMS was a reminder that even the most AI invested firms are still betting heavily on people to get this right. The harder question, the one we spend our days in, is what that actually looks like in practice.
Across our leadership mandates this year, with companies including Anthropic, Cognition, Shield AI, Datadog etc, one pattern has stood out.
The winning candidate profile
The strongest hires we have made are not chosen for technical depth or sales strength alone. They are candidates who have carried both: credible enough on the technical side to hold their own with an engineering team, and proven enough commercially to have carried a number in a market moving this fast.
Just as importantly, they are candidates willing to take a real bet. Leaders we place into these roles are rarely the ones with the safest résumé. They are the ones who have chosen to walk into ambiguity, put their own credibility behind an AI strategy before the playbook was settled, and use their technical grounding to make that bet a considered one rather than a gamble. That combination, technical judgment plus genuine appetite for risk, is what we now screen for first.
What we look for beyond the resume
In practice we test for three things:
- How a candidate describes a decision they made with incomplete information
- How they talk about a team they had to realign mid-project
- How they talk Whether their story of impact centres on what they built, or what they got others to builda team they had to realign mid-project
Candidates who score well on the third point consistently go on to succeed in these roles.
Japan is not the slow mover it is made out to be
Consensus-driven decision-making and governance rigor slow the early stages of a search here. But they also mean a leadership hire tends to stick once made, with real organizational backing behind it. We are seeing more companies look to build leadership in Japan than at any point in the past three years, and it is a strong moment for leaders who have genuinely done this before to be visible in the market.
Whether you are a company building this kind of leadership pipeline who has taken that kind of bet yourself and is thinking about the next one, we would be glad to talk it through.
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