Last quarter, we ran a CEO search that drew more than 200 applicants in the first three days. On paper, it was an embarrassment of riches. In practice, we had received a stack of resumes so uniformly polished, so on-message, so perfectly tailored to the role, that our team had a harder time distinguishing the strong candidates from those who were more basically qualified. The written materials were no longer very helpful in sorting out which individuals were the best fit for the position so our team had to weight more heavily candidates' LinkedIn profiles, answers to pre-application questions and the first round interview.
Search isn't broken but the process we have traditionally relied on is teetering on the edge of relevance.
If we reflect on the state of executive hiring in 2026, the machinery underneath the process has changed, even when the surface looks the same. AI is rewiring how candidates apply, how some firms source, how diligence happens, and how decisions get made. The boards still running 2022-era searches are about to make some expensive mistakes.
Sourcing pools have widened in ways that benefit clients. In good ways, like the fact that AI tools and the ability for people to so quickly find out about positions surfaces qualified candidates that traditional networks miss, producing stronger and more diverse slates than firms could reliably build three years ago.
The harder news is what's happening on the candidate side, though. Applicants use the same tools we do so that cover letters are sharper and resumes are tailored with surgical precision to the job description. Candidates walk into interviews having pattern-matched against every public statement the organization has made and every board member's LinkedIn history. The signal that used to come from a strong written application has degraded, which means we need to find new ways of evaluating candidates' skills.
Three things are different than they were even eighteen months ago.
Written materials are no longer differentiating in and of themselves. If your search committee is still doing first-round triage primarily on paper, you're triaging on noise.
Interviews matter more than ever - they are the first real signal you get about a candidate's actual judgment and presence. They need to be structured to surface what AI can't help a candidate fake: how they handle being wrong in real time, how they respond to questions they didn't prepare for or how they treat people when no one's watching.
"Culture fit" is more dangerous than ever. Polished candidates can pattern-match to whatever a hiring committee signals it wants. The board that hires on vibes in 2026 is hiring on performance, not substance.
Within 24 months, the resume as we know it may be functionally dead for executive roles. Search firms and boards will likely need to move toward structured work samples, recorded scenario responses, and AI-assisted assessment of actual leadership behaviors. The firms still building slates around resume review will look like they're using fax machines.
A meaningful share of small and perhaps even mid-tier search firms won't survive this transition. Elite firms have the capital to build proprietary tools and AI-native upstarts have the speed and the price point. The firms stuck in the middle - running 2019 process at 2026 prices - will get squeezed from both sides.
Boards are about to get a lot of AI-generated candidate assessments they don't know how to read. Synthesis reports, behavioral predictions, fit analyses - these will all be increasingly available, increasingly persuasive, and difficult to interpret by most board members. The next wave of bad CEO hires won't come from too little data, instead they will come from too much data, which is not well understood.
Finally, the good news for small to mid sized search firms who are able to innovate is that the premium on human judgment is going up, not down. AI handles synthesis and pattern-matching brilliantly. It cannot tell a board that the candidate they've fallen in love with is wrong for the moment the organization is actually in. It cannot push back on a committee chair anchoring on the wrong criteria. It cannot read a room. It is a valuable tool to support human judgment, but it needs to used as a tool and not as the decision maker itself.
The risk isn't that AI will replace executive search. The risk is that boards will assume the process still works the way it used to, and stop asking the harder questions of me and my peers, namely how candidates are being sourced, where human judgment actually lives in our firms' workflows, and what their own committee can do to compensate for the fact that paper credentials no longer mean the same as they did just a year or two ago.
The boards that recognize this will hire better leaders this decade. The ones still running the old playbook will spend the next five years wondering why their last three hires looked so promising on paper and underperformed in the seat.
The machinery has changed and now the question is whether the people pulling the levers know it yet.
Christina Greenberg is CEO of Edgility Search where she supports executives and boards with leader transitions, governance and evaluation. Read more on her Forbes Business Council Executive Profile.