About / Our Story
Nine years ago, we were running a boutique executive search firm in Tokyo and watching great candidates slip past us, not because we weren't good recruiters, but because the sourcing tools we had access to were the same ones every other agency was using. So we built our own.
The thesis
Every hiring decision is fundamentally human. Trust between a recruiter and a candidate. A conversation at the right moment. The judgment to match a person, not just a résumé, to an opportunity. That part of our industry never stops being human work.
But sourcing, the process of identifying who to approach, building the shortlist, writing the outreach, that's where humans hit a ceiling. A senior recruiter in Tokyo can review maybe 200 candidates carefully for a role. Our AI reviews 4 million. And it does it in seconds, not weeks.
We built AgentRPO to resolve that contradiction. AI does the sourcing. Humans do the recruiting. Each side does only what it does best.
Timeline
From a boutique search firm to a wholly-owned subsidiary of a publicly listed global consultancy, and a category-defining AI recruiting platform along the way.
Ken Charles and Cody Pettit incorporate the firm with a radical premise: AI-first recruiting isn't a side project, it's the whole business model. The company launches operations in February 2018 from a small office in Shibuya.
Spring 2022: we integrate GPT-3 into our candidate scoring and scout-message generation pipeline. At the time, AI-powered recruiting wasn't a category, it was a curiosity. By 2024 it would be the most crowded space in HR tech.
October 2023: ExecutiveSearch.AI joins Monstarlab Inc. (TSE Growth: 5255), a publicly listed global digital-transformation and AI consultancy with 26 offices across 20 countries. The acquisition brings enterprise infrastructure, compliance, and global reach, while preserving the founding team and mission.
We retire BizReach, LinkedIn Recruiter, and every traditional sourcing platform from our workflow. Every candidate we approach from this day forward is identified by our own AI. Every scout message is personalized by our own AI. Recruiters focus on what only humans can do, meetings, motivations, and closing. Q1 2026 ended up being our highest-performing quarter in every major metric.
ESAI Agency K.K. is established as a wholly-owned subsidiary to operate the AgentRPO recruiting service, with the technology company (ExecutiveSearch.AI K.K.) continuing as a sister entity to develop Headhunt.AI. Two companies. One thesis. Same team.
The founders
Ken Charles (CEO) and Cody Pettit (Head of Data Operations) met in Tokyo in 2014, working as senior recruiters at a global executive search firm. They became convinced that the traditional recruiting workflow was structurally broken and that software, not more recruiters, was the answer. In 2017 they left to start ExecutiveSearch.AI. Nine years later, they still run the business together, now alongside the partners Gary Schrader and Eileen Tian.
Work with us
Every placement, every scout, every conversation since 2018 is embedded in the way we work today. It's also embedded in our AI.
