By Paolo Damia and Daniele Cuminale, Trevisearch / AltoPartners Italy

An earlier version of this article was originally published in Italian on the Trevisearch / AltoPartners Italy website.

Artificial Intelligence can help us build flawless — even “perfect” — CVs. Human Intelligence, through executive search, must understand what lies behind them: who has genuinely turned experience into capability, who can transfer that capability into a new context, and who will be able to make a difference and create value.

Artificial Intelligence is no longer a future prospect for recruitment.

It is already here.

It helps us search for information, identify profiles, compare skills, draft job descriptions, organise large volumes of data and dramatically accelerate activities that, until recently, required hours of work.

According to LinkedIn’s Future of Recruiting 2025, 37% of organisations surveyed were already experimenting with or actively integrating generative AI into recruitment. Those using it reported saving an average of around 20% of their working week.

And this is only the beginning.

But there is another change that we find even more interesting.

AI is not only being used by those looking for people.

It is also being used by those who want to be found.

Everyone can now have a “perfect” CV

Today, candidates can use AI to create an extremely effective CV in a matter of minutes: well written, clearly structured, tailored to a specific position and designed to highlight precisely the experience and language an organisation expects to see.

There is nothing inherently wrong with this.

If technology helps people communicate their experience more effectively, it can be an extremely useful tool.

But it creates a paradox.

The easier it becomes to write a “perfect” CV, the less sufficient the CV alone becomes in distinguishing one person from another.

Because a perfect CV is not simply written.

It has to be lived.

And yet even experience itself is not enough.

Experience is not capability

After many years spent meeting and assessing executives, one distinction has become particularly important to us: experience is not the same as capability.

Two people may have held the same role, in the same industry, for the same number of years.

On paper, they may appear almost interchangeable.

In reality, they may have developed profoundly different capabilities.

The difference lies in what they have learned from their experiences.

Did they understand why a decision worked — or why it did not?

Were they able to distinguish what depended on the organisation around them from what genuinely came from their own abilities?

Did they turn successes and failures into judgement?

Can they recognise a familiar problem when it appears in an unfamiliar form?

Experience becomes capability when people learn from it.

That distinction matters enormously in executive search.

Because the number of years spent in a role tells us something about a person’s career.

It tells us much less about what that person has actually become through those years.

The real question is transferability

Executive search is not simply about finding someone who has already done the same job.

Very often, organisations are looking for someone capable of addressing a new problem: a transformation, a different culture, a period of growth, a turnaround or a changing competitive environment.

So the question cannot simply be: “Have they done this before?”

It needs to become: “What did they learn from doing it?”

And then: “Will what they learned work here?”

That is a very different question.

One executive may have delivered outstanding results thanks to a powerful brand, an exceptional team, abundant resources or a particularly favourable environment.

Another may have developed deeper capabilities precisely because they had to achieve results with fewer resources, greater complexity or problems for which no ready-made solution existed.

Reading a CV tells us what happened.

Executive search tries to understand what a person became as a result of what happened — and what they may be capable of doing next.

This is also why the candidate whose past most closely resembles the job description is not necessarily the person best equipped for the future.

A capability developed in another industry may prove highly relevant.

An apparently lateral career move may have created strengths that a more conventional path never required.

Sometimes, the less obvious candidate is precisely the one capable of bringing into an organisation something that does not yet exist.

Why AI can make executive search more valuable

At first sight, this may seem counterintuitive.

If AI becomes increasingly effective at finding and analysing profiles, surely there should be less need for executive search.

We believe the opposite may be true.

AI can make many operational activities faster and more effective. It can help us explore wider markets, organise information, identify connections and free up time currently absorbed by repetitive work.

In our work at Trevisearch / AltoPartners Italy, we use Artificial Intelligence extensively as a tool to support research, analysis, reporting and many of the activities surrounding an executive search.

But we have drawn a clear line.

AI can support the process. It cannot take responsibility for the decision.

We do not use automation to decide who should progress and who should be excluded.

Because our work is not simply about matching a collection of CVs against a job description.

It is about understanding an organisation and its context, meeting people, reconstructing what they have really done, discovering what they have learned and assessing whether the capabilities they have built can create value somewhere else.

Technology can help us do all of this better.

But it cannot reduce it to an automatic process.

Less time searching. More time understanding.

The future of executive search should therefore not be framed as a contest between Artificial and Human Intelligence.

AI or people.

Algorithms or judgement.

Technology or experience.

AI is valuable precisely because it can allow us to spend less time doing what machines do well and more time doing what still requires curiosity, listening, experience and judgement.

And, in our view, this is the real opportunity.

Not simply to process more candidates.

But to spend more time knowing and understanding people.

Because identifying the right executive requires more than knowing what someone has done.

We need to understand what they have learned.

What capabilities they have genuinely developed.

How much those capabilities truly belong to them rather than to the environment in which they operated.

Whether they can transfer them into a new context.

And whether, in a different organisation and at a different point in its history, they can turn those capabilities into results and value.

That, for us, is the essence of executive search.

And that is why, paradoxically, the better Artificial Intelligence becomes at creating and recognising “perfect” CVs, the more Human Intelligence we will need to know and understand the people behind them.

Paolo Damia and Daniele Cuminale are Partners at Trevisearch / AltoPartners Italy, based in Milan.