EP148: Laurel Group - How AI Is Shaping Executive Recruitment

All-In Recruitment is a podcast by Manatal focusing on all things related to the recruitment industry’s missions and trends. Join us in our conversations with leaders in the recruitment space and learn their best practices to transform the way you hire.

This transcript has been edited for clarity.

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Lydia: Welcome to the All In Recruitment podcast by Manatal, where we explore best practices, learnings, and trends with leaders in the recruitment space. If you like our content, please subscribe to our channels on YouTube, Apple Podcast, and Spotify.

I'm your host, Lydia, and this week we have Chris Berta, who is a partner at Laurel Group. Thank you for joining us, Chris.

Chris: It is an absolute pleasure to be here, Lydia. Thank you for having me.

Executive Search Meets Generative AI

Lydia: So, you have extensive experience in the industry, I mean, decades, right? How have you seen the executive search landscape evolve, particularly in tech?

Chris: Yeah, so I am in Seattle, and we have partners in Silicon Valley as well. We have really been on the cutting edge of where technology has come and evolved from. We have two decades’ worth of recruiting. We have seen companies go from on-premises to Software as a Service. We have seen the evolution and development of cloud companies, so we have been at the cutting edge of AWS and seeing that start from scratch. We have seen Azure, we have seen Google, and all these different cloud providers, and now, of course, you have generative AI, which is disrupting the landscape and producing all the different companies that are growing out of that.

So we focus on growth companies. These are companies that get venture capital or private equity funding. They are primarily technology companies, and we have seen them either get consumed by the larger companies, with whom we have also done work. For example, we have worked with AWS on an acquisition they have done over the years. Watching the different winners and then the companies that have not survived in those different transitions has been fascinating. It has been fun to be at the cutting edge and really at the ground floor of many of these companies and the technology development that they have had.

Lydia: So, tell us a little bit more about Laurel Group.

Chris: Sure. We are a partner-led organization. The two founders who had started the Laurel Group had come from Heidrick and Struggles. Heidrick and Struggles is the 800-pound gorilla for executive search; it is a public company. The two founders had come from there and wanted to start their own boutique firm. We focus on technology companies by and large, or companies that want to become more technology-enabled.

We focus on the entire executive suite. My background was product management and online marketing, so I like to focus on the go-to-market functions within a company. That could be product management, marketing, or sales. Oftentimes, we will have a company where I have placed a Vice President of Product or Chief Product Officer, and then they say, “Can you take on these other functions—Vice President of Engineering or similar?” We end up filling out the entire executive suite of those organizations.

A good example would be a company called DuckDuckGo, which is a privacy-focused search engine. We started off with a Head of Business Development role that I filled. Then from there, Head of Product, Vice President of Product, Vice President of Engineering, and Chief Financial Officer. We built out a large part of their executive suite because of our knowledge of the business and how to sell that to the market. That is really where I think our bread and butter is—understanding our client’s value proposition and bringing that to market.

Cutting Through the Noise with Human Insight

Lydia: And how has AI, there is a lot of talk and a lot of implementation, different use cases for AI how has AI transformed your executive search processes at Laurel Group over the past few years?

Chris: I would say that it has accelerated a lot of the functions that we have had. When it comes to research or developing content or marketing—because my background has been in marketing as well—we have been able to accelerate a lot of that development.

For our clients, quite frankly, it has actually impacted their business and their recruiting process in a lot of cases in a negative way, because it has almost become too easy to apply to jobs. They are overwhelmed with the number of applicants they are seeing. I wrote a paper about this where, on average, there are 400 applicants for every role that is posted. If a company has 10 roles, then that is 4,000 applicants that they have to go through.

During COVID and the downsizing of different functional areas, if they cut back on the number of recruiters, now those recruiters are being overwhelmed with the sheer volume of candidates applying for these roles. I actually think that is helpful for executive search and agencies because we can help sort through that volume and just bring to the table the right handful of candidates they should be talking to. We can help comb through a lot of the noise that is out there.

I feel like it has become too easy to apply for a role. The other example I use is that if a company is using AI to write their job description and then they post it online, then candidates can use different tools to have their resume and cover letter written by an AI tool. Then it gets applied to however many roles that have a similar job title, and it goes into the queue of that company. Now you have an Applicant Tracking System monitoring those resumes coming in. You have a three-step process where you may have some human oversight, but it is largely the technology evaluating the technology and the output of that.

That is where the recruiting process—or people—and it is a people business—comes in. You need to have recruiters who know the right people and have the right network of profiles to step in and really help cut through a lot of that noise.

Why Soft Skills Outweigh Technical Skills in the AI Era

Lydia: So when it becomes too easy to apply for a job, I mean, executive search has its own processes, maybe their own talent pools or the way they reach out to passive candidates, right? So when an agency or a firm like yours takes on that volume of candidates, is there a workaround that you have to really speed that process up?

Chris: In some cases, it is the network that we have. Typically, if there are a ton of applicants coming through, you can go through and just know the function, and knowing the client, you can see profiles that are going to fit in and which ones are not pretty quickly. But a lot of it is our going after passive candidates who are not actively looking around and going and finding those people that have the right industry experience, the right pedigree, and the right functional roles within those companies. Hopefully, we have had conversations with them previously for other engagements that we have had, so we have a knowledge of what their capabilities are, and we know them as a person to know if they are the right cultural fit as well for our clients.

Lydia: Now, moving on to the next question. I saw this LinkedIn report from this year that says that by 2030, 70 percent of the skills used in most jobs will change. We are seeing AI emerging as a major catalyst. How has this affected the way you evaluate a candidate’s potential versus their core technical capabilities?

Chris: We have always looked at trying to make sure that the candidate has the functional skills but also has the soft skills and the cultural fit for our clients. When you marry those two together, that is when you get the ideal profile.

I think with the use of AI becoming more and more important or a component of a person’s job, the soft skills are going to be what separates those that are strong candidates and strong workers versus those that are less so. There was a report in 2024 that showed there was the highest number of Chief Executive Officer turnovers. We are already seeing AI becoming impactful even to the Chief Executive Officer level. My hypothesis around that is because with AI, the functional components, a lot of the areas of analysis and similar tasks are going to be taken up by technology.

Really it is the buy-in, the creating of a vision, the—

Lydia: Storytelling.

Chris: Exactly. For a leader, this can now be applied to other parts of the organization as well. But you need to have those soft skills, those storytelling skills, being able to get people’s buy-in to your vision. That is going to be more important. That is where I think these skills are going to be critical. AI is not going to be able to read a room. It is not going to be able to know who to bring into a conversation at what time to gain that buy-in and who is the decision maker within those companies that you want to get their support so that you can help move that initiative forward. That is where I think this is going to become more and more important for all levels of an organization—the buy-in, the internal sales skill set.

Lydia: How do organizational needs differ between emerging companies, as you mentioned earlier, versus established corporations? You have seen both sides.

Chris: We have worked with public companies that are 10,000, 100,000 in size, to the small growth companies that are just getting investments from venture capital or private equity. Starting with those, it really is somebody who has a breadth of experience and has the desire to step in. Of course you are wearing many hats, but being able to anticipate where there is going to be a gap in the capabilities of the organization and being able to roll up your sleeves and step in to take on that responsibility, even if it is not in your initial job description. It is understanding and having a passion and interest in finding where those gaps are within the organization and stepping in to address those.

Whereas at a more enterprise-sized company, it really is understanding the internal network and understanding how to gain buy-in with the peers of that role. You have to understand what team to bring into the process and at what time so that initiative can move forward. We have worked with Microsoft over the years, and in that environment people are successful because they have the internal network and know who the resources are internally to bring in to help get their initiative moved forward quickly.

Whereas a lot of times a Microsoft person is not going to be as effective in a smaller startup because they are used to having those resources around them. They are used to calling on somebody to fill in that gap. Whereas if you are at a small startup, there is nobody to call on—you have to do it yourself. It is a different skill set and a different mentality that you are bringing to the table. It is difficult because a lot of times you have companies that want to have a person who comes with that knowledge of Microsoft, but they realize that person is used to such a team surrounding them that they are not going to be as effective. Even if they have the technical knowledge, they may not have the ability to work effectively with a smaller organization, and just do it themselves instead of having resources to call on.

Empowering Teams to Explore Generative AI

Lydia: We have spoken about how skills and the need for newer skills are going to come very soon. With such dramatic skills transformation ahead, what might be some ways to attract that kind of talent who would thrive in such a landscape?

Chris: From a client standpoint, we have encouraged our clients to offer training, to offer an environment where they can explore, and reward their team to find new applications for generative AI, especially. There are a lot of different technologies being developed, and no one has solved this yet. No one has been 100 percent successful in saying, “Here is the answer around how we are going to use generative AI in our business.” What they are doing is asking their employees to try it, figure out ways and use cases, and then share that with the rest of the company on how it has been used successfully in their environment.

So I think being able to tell the market and tell candidates that we are empowering our team to leverage these new tools, and we are making sure they are sharing that across the company, helps the candidate feel like they are at the cutting edge of where this technology is going—because no one really has that answer yet. That makes sure candidates recognize that the company is curious, there is appetite for exploring these new solutions, and they are coming up with what is going to be best for them in that environment.

Lydia: So it is making space for that innovation or that experimental mindset.

Chris: Exactly.

Lydia: Now, looking ahead, what major shifts do you anticipate in organizational talent needs over the next five years or maybe even two years?

Chris: Two years, five years—things are happening so quickly. Here is my thinking around this. We are talking about AI agents. You have Salesforce creating agents. You have all these different capabilities being created. I think from an organizational development standpoint, you are going to end up seeing a function that is going to manage the AI agents.

If you think about a marketing operations person who is responsible for the marketing stack, they are responsible for all the technologies that marketing uses. You have an operations person who is responsible for that. Now, envision that on a company-wide standpoint. You have an operations person—an AI operations person—who is responsible for these AI agents and creating a workflow that is going to be done by these agents across the different functional areas of the organization.

So I think maybe two years down the road, when agents are more widely adopted, the question becomes who is in control of those agents within that company, and who is evaluating the capabilities, the understanding, the information sharing? Who is going to control what is shared, what is not shared? There are a lot of compliance issues that come with that. You need to have someone who is going to be overseeing all of that to make sure that it is done correctly and that best practices are being adhered to.

Lydia: When you speak to your clients, Chris, do you bring this proposition to them? Do you talk to them about this idea, and what might be the feedback that you get?

Chris: This is still very early stages. I have not really talked to clients, as I have been doing a search around this need yet. I have talked to more functional leaders who are saying, “We are using agents in this capacity.” It has been more of a part of their workflow in silos. I just see that the need over time is going to be bringing that all together, so it is an environment where, like I said, security and all these other elements are being considered as they end up using those tools more and more.

Why Motivation Matters as Much as Skills

Lydia: And finally, Chris, what advice would you give someone who is starting out in this space today—the talent space?

Chris: I think anybody who is starting in this has to like people and has to like talking to people and being curious about what motivates a person. We try to focus on understanding the functional expertise that our candidates have, but also their motivation. That comes down to being curious about what their goals are, where they want to end up in their career, and where they want to end up in the future.

I remember I was talking to a head of marketing at a small company. We were talking about their motivation, where they could see themselves in five or 10 years. It was just getting a really good sense of that person’s motivation. Then six months later or nine months later, I had a role where I said, “Wait a second, I had this great conversation with this person. I am going to bring that person into this recruiting process because her motivation was exactly what we were looking for in this role.”

It is that curiosity and wanting to solve the puzzle of finding the right person for the right fit. Sometimes when that happens, it is magical. When you have the right fit with the right team, all of a sudden, that team does something extraordinary because everybody is working so well together. That feels great. But that comes down to asking questions, being curious, and taking the conversation to the next level of not just being a transaction but being a talent advisor to people and making sure those combinations are fitting correctly.

Lydia: Thank you very much for your time and all these insights, Chris. I am sure whoever is listening might want to connect with you and continue the conversation, so this is a time to drop in your contact details, or if you have a website.

Chris: Sure. Our website is www.laurel-group.com, and I am Chris Berta on LinkedIn. Like I said, I am in Seattle, so feel free to look me up. If you have questions about recruiting or executive search, I am happy to answer them.

Lydia: Thank you again, Chris. We have been in conversation with Chris Berta, Partner at Laurel Group. Thank you for joining us, and stay tuned for more episodes from All in Recruitment on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify.