James Gathercole’s Post

The conventional wisdom is that big agencies win on AI. More budget. More data. Bigger tech teams. I think it's the opposite. Boutique executive search firms are structurally better positioned to get leverage from AI than global agencies. Here's why. Global agencies have complexity that AI can't easily untangle. Layered approvals. Competing priorities across hundreds of open roles. Partners who sell and consultants who deliver. Context that gets lost every time a candidate is handed off. Boutique firms don't have that problem. The person who takes the brief runs the search. The client gets direct access. The candidate gets a recruiter who genuinely understands the market. AI removes the one thing that used to cap them: capacity. A three-person firm that used to max out at three or four concurrent searches can now run six to eight. Same team. Same quality. Twice the mandate load. That's not a marginal improvement. That's a business model shift. The firms that move first on this won't just grow faster. They'll take mandates that would have gone to larger competitors by default. Full breakdown in the link in comments. #ExecutiveSearch #BoutiqueRecruitment #AIRecruiting #RecruitmentTech #CoRecruit