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By Marek Navratil
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By 2030, the World Economic Forum expects job creation and displacement to affect the equivalent of 22 percent of today's jobs, while 39 percent of workers’ existing skill sets are expected to be transformed or become outdated.
That matters far beyond the future of individual careers. It raises a more immediate question for companies making senior appointments: if the work is changing this quickly, how can we keep defining leadership using criteria built for the work of yesterday?
The problem is becoming harder to ignore because artificial intelligence (AI) is changing the hiring process at the same time that it is changing the jobs people are being hired to do.
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LinkedIn’s 2026 research found that 93 percent of recruiters plan to increase their use of AI this year, yet 66 percent say finding qualified talent has become harder.
At the same time, 59 percent say AI is already helping them discover candidates with skills they might not otherwise have found.
For executive search, that creates a strange moment. We have more technology for finding and evaluating candidates, more information about their professional histories and more sophisticated tools for processing applications.
Yet the central question remains surprisingly difficult: what does a qualified executive actually look like when the requirements of the role are changing?
I call this recruitment's liminal era.
Liminality describes a period of transition between established systems. That is increasingly how I see executive recruitment.
The old structures have not disappeared, but they are no longer sufficient on their own. Job descriptions, position titles, career paths and resumes still matter, but they are becoming less reliable as complete representations of what a person can contribute.
Becoming More Precise
The executive CV is a good example. For decades, it has functioned as a relatively stable record of capability.
A candidate worked in a particular sector, held increasingly senior positions, acquired certain credentials and accumulated experience that appeared to map logically onto the next role.
That model becomes less useful when the underlying work changes faster than the career path.
The World Economic Forum reports that 86 percent of employers expect AI and information-processing technologies to transform their businesses by 2030.
It also identifies analytical thinking, resilience, flexibility, agility and leadership among the capabilities that will remain important as organizations adapt.
This does not mean experience has become irrelevant. It means we need to become more precise about what experience actually tells us.
A decade ago, a company searching for a chief sales officer might have placed enormous weight on whether the candidate had spent years selling within the same industry.
What Career History Can’t Tell Us
Today, that assumption deserves to be tested.
The more important question may be whether the candidate understands how to build a sales organization, interpret changing customer behavior, lead teams through uncertainty and learn a new commercial environment quickly.
I saw this directly in a recent executive search for a major hotel chain. The company initially looked for a chief sales officer with conventional hospitality credentials.
As we reconsidered the brief, however, the focus shifted toward transferable capability. The eventual appointment came from an IT sales background rather than the traditional hotel industry path.
The executive was subsequently onboarded and joined the company's executive committee.
For me, that case illustrates something important. A career history can tell us where someone has been. It does not necessarily tell us what they are capable of doing next.
Every Search Is Research
My own approach to executive search has been shaped by that distinction. I am both interested in the organizational problem a client is trying to solve and in the individual behind the professional profile.
My academic background is in social psychology, including doctoral research focused on emotional reactions and the perception of aggression, before I moved into HR and eventually executive search.
That background has influenced how I approach interviews and searches. I do not see an executive search as simply a process of matching keywords to a job description.
Every search is, for me, a research project. I am trying to understand what the organization actually needs, what the candidate has demonstrated and where the conventional profile may obscure something important.
That becomes especially relevant as AI enters both sides of the hiring process.
Candidates can use AI to produce polished CVs and prepare for interviews. Recruiters can use AI to identify candidates, screen applications and structure interviews.
LinkedIn’s research shows that 66 percent of recruiters plan to increase their use of AI for pre-screening interviews in 2026, with 70 percent believing this will lead to more valuable candidate conversations.
The technology can improve the process. But it also changes the evidence we are looking at.
If candidates and recruiters are increasingly using similar technologies to optimize the hiring process, presentation becomes easier to standardize.
That makes it even more important to understand how someone thinks, learns and responds when the situation cannot be reduced to a polished answer.
This is where I believe the definition of executive capability needs to expand.
Understanding What AI Can Do
Technical skills will continue to matter. Sector knowledge will continue to matter. But adaptability is becoming increasingly difficult to separate from leadership itself.
An executive who understands a business deeply but cannot adapt as its operating environment changes may face a very different challenge from an executive who has moved between industries but repeatedly demonstrated the ability to learn and lead.
The same applies to artificial intelligence.
I increasingly see a meaningful distinction between executives who have incorporated AI into their daily work and those who have not.
This is not simply about knowing how to use a particular tool. It is about understanding what AI can change in a workflow, where its limitations lie and how to integrate it into decision-making without surrendering human judgment.
In that sense, AI fluency may become less like a specialist technical skill and more like a baseline leadership capability.
The recruitment industry therefore faces a paradox. Technology is giving us new ways to find candidates while simultaneously making it more important to question the signals we have traditionally relied upon.
That is why I believe the next phase of executive search cannot be about making the old process faster. It has to involve reconsidering what we are actually trying to measure.
Revisiting Job Descriptions
Companies should be prepared to revisit job descriptions before launching searches.
They should ask whether the title still describes the work. They should distinguish between genuinely essential experience and experience that has simply become customary.
And they should test candidates for their capacity to learn, adapt and operate in an environment where the requirements of the role may continue changing after they are hired.
The candidate side of the equation is changing too. Executives should not assume that a familiar career trajectory automatically communicates future value.
Increasingly, they may need to demonstrate how they have learned new systems, entered unfamiliar markets, adapted their leadership approach and incorporated emerging technologies into their work.
The "liminal era" is therefore not simply a period of technological disruption. It is a period in which the categories we use to describe professional capability are themselves being tested.
The question for executive search is no longer simply whether someone has held the right title, worked in the right industry or followed the expected career path.
It is whether those signals still tell us what we need to know.
As the workplace changes, leadership hiring has to change with it. Organizations should start by questioning the assumptions built into their job descriptions, separating genuinely essential capabilities from credentials that have simply become customary, and assessing candidates for their ability to learn and adapt as the role evolves.
The next executive search should not begin with a familiar title or a predetermined career path. It should begin with a clearer question: what will this organization actually need its next leader to do, and which capabilities will allow that person to succeed as those needs change?
If the nature of leadership is evolving, the way we identify leaders needs to evolve with it.
Marek Navratil is the founder and chief executive of Adaptive Recruitment, a Czech firm providing executive-search and leadership-assessment services. His company uses AI-enabled tools as part of its recruitment work. The views expressed in this article are his own.
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