Don’t use AI only to write the reply. Use it to decide whether to reply.
After discovering that two apparently unrelated “executive search” approaches sent virtually the same follow-up script, I changed the way we handle unsolicited opportunities.
I asked Tara, the AI system I work with daily, to create a standing screening rule for the way she reviews opportunities in both my personal inbox and Careerly’s:
Unexpected opportunity + flattering specificity + vague employer + unfamiliar domain = independently verify before replying.
And “verify” means more than Googling the company name.
Beacon Hill was real.
The problem was that the person claiming to represent Beacon Hill apparently wasn’t.
A real organizational name does not authenticate the sender.
So before we spend time drafting a response, sending a CV or getting emotionally invested, we now check:
Does the person exist?
Does the company exist?
Does that person actually work there?
Does the sender’s email domain belong to that organization?
Can they be corroborated on the company’s own website?
Has the company issued warnings about recruiter impersonation?
Is the supposedly “confidential” role suspiciously vague?
Does the language resemble a template we’ve seen elsewhere?
That last one is increasingly important.
Scam campaigns reuse language. Once you’ve seen enough, phrases and structures become recognizable.
And this is where AI is genuinely useful.
Not simply:
“Tara, draft me a polished reply.”
But:
“Tara, before we reply, authenticate this opportunity.”
Because the fastest response in the world is useless if the underlying opportunity isn’t real.
There was also an unexpected upside to the fake Beacon Hill approach.
Beacon Hill itself is a legitimate executive-search firm.
And so are firms such as Korn Ferry, Heidrick & Struggles, Egon Zehnder, Russell Reynolds and Spencer Stuart.
Executive-search firms generally don’t act as personal agents promising to find you a job. Their client is usually the employer conducting a particular search.
But that means something else matters:
you want to be known to the right search consultants before the relevant mandate lands on their desk.
You want your background searchable in their systems, and ideally you want the right consultants in your field or geography to know who you are.
So there was one useful irony in all of this.
Instead of answering somebody pretending to represent an executive-search firm, the better move may simply be:
go find the real people.
Which is exactly what we’re doing next.
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