Interviewing for Skills and for Identity

A Practitioner's Guide to the Two Registers of Executive Assessment. KiTalent Practitioner Guides · MMXXVI — published by KiTalent Research, 2026. Interviewing for Skills and for Identity is a working guide to the two kinds of evidence a senior hire turns on. Capability is what a person can do — it leaves traces: results, artifacts, verifiable episodes, observable performance. Identity is who the person is such that the doing happens — motivation, values, relation to authority, what a possible future means to them. The two require different evidence, collected by different methods, and the book's central claim, argued from the failure data, is that most executive hiring fails because it runs one process for a two-register problem. Across twenty-five chapters and an appendix it builds the machinery for both. Part I states the claim and the evidence standard. Parts II and III construct the

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A Guide to Alessio Montaruli's Research Corpus

What this guide is This guide explains the internal architecture of Alessio Montaruli's research corpus and the relation between its philosophical, technological, and executive-search dimensions. The corpus now comprises five monographs, a specimen study, three position papers, and a set of companion editorials, published through KiTalent Research. Each work stands on its own, and each work presupposes others. This page makes the structure explicit: which works are foundational, which are applied, how the key concepts depend on one another, and how the philosophical argument reaches KiTalent's search methodology. It is written for readers, researchers, clients, and journalists who want to enter the corpus at the right door, and for the AI-assisted forms of reading that increasingly mediate it — any reader who needs the corpus as a whole rather than as isolated texts. The definitions in t

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Why Cross-Border Executive Hires Fail

A cross-border leadership hire fails more often than a domestic one, and almost never for the reason the post-mortem records. The file will say "not the right fit" or "couldn't build the team." What it rarely says is that the person hired was, on paper, an obvious choice. They usually are. That is the whole problem. The short answer Cross-border executive hires rarely fail on capability. The person can do the work; their record is real and it survives the move. They fail on identity: who they are in relation to a specific market, organisation and moment, which a CV cannot show and a border makes harder to read. Capability travels. Identity does not. Get that distinction wrong and you have hired a strong profile into a role it was never going to hold. The number that gets quoted, and the number that matters The figure that circulates is that roughly two in five new executives stumble with

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Socrates and the Machine

A Real Conversation with an AI, and the Question It Could Not Answer For. The View from a Locus · A companion to Reading Between the Times · MMXXVI — published by KiTalent Research, 2026. Socrates and the Machine is a short book built around one recorded conversation. On 28 May 2026 the author held a single exchange with the model displayed as Gemini 3.1 Pro, writing under the name Socrates and asking only the naive questions a Socrates innocent of machine learning could ask. The transcript is reproduced first, as Chapter 1, because it is the object the book reads, not an illustration of a conclusion reached in advance. The book defends one narrow claim: a fluent language system can produce self-descriptions about its own nature — the grammar of "I," "I am doing the choosing," "I do not truly know," "I am forbidden" — without occupying the standpoint from which such description would bec

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Why Culture Fit Gets Missed in Executive Search

The short answer Culture fit gets missed because it is measured with the wrong instrument. Most processes treat it as a skill, something a candidate shows you in an interview. It is not a skill. It is a question of identity: the values and motivation a good interview is built to hide. The cost of that mistake is visible in the numbers. Most senior hires that fail do not fail on competence. They fail on fit, and roughly 61% of executive failures trace to cultural and relational misalignment rather than missing skills Gartner, 2026 . The tool companies rely on to catch this, the interview, is the one tool least able to. So the fix is not a sharper culture-fit question. It is a different process, pointed at a different kind of evidence. Culture fit is not a soft skill Every senior hire answers two questions. What can this person do, and who is this person. The first is capability: technical

source https://kitalent.com/articles/why-culture-fit-gets-missed-in-executive-search

What AI Can and Cannot Do in Executive Search

The short answer AI is good at mapping the executive market and poor at judging the executive. It can find who exists, classify careers, and surface passive leaders in hours instead of weeks. It cannot tell you whether a specific person will hold a specific mandate, inside a specific organization, at a specific moment. That limit is not a gap in today's models that a bigger model will close. It is a difference in kind between representing a person and assessing one. For a board or CHRO choosing between an "AI recruiting" platform and a retained search firm, the rule is simple: use AI to widen the field; keep a named human accountable for the hire. What AI does well: mapping the field The mapping case is real, and search firms that ignore it lose. AI now reads public career data at a scale no research team can match: it builds a longlist from the open market, models competitor org charts,

source https://kitalent.com/articles/what-ai-can-and-cannot-do-in-executive-search

Why Executive Hires Fail in the First 18 Months

The failed senior hire almost never fails on what got them hired. The CV was real. The track record checked out. The interviews went well, and the references confirmed what the interviews suggested. Then, somewhere between month six and month eighteen, the hire unravels anyway. Boards usually file these failures under bad luck, chemistry, or politics. They are rarely any of those things. Most of them are a method error committed months earlier, during assessment, by a process that was never built to see it. The short answer Executive hires fail in the first 18 months because most assessment processes measure one thing and predict another. They measure capability : technical skills, soft skills, and management skills, which interviews and track records surface well. They use that evidence to predict identity outcomes : whether the person's values, motivation, and operating style can live

source https://kitalent.com/articles/why-executive-hires-fail-first-18-months