“Girls in the Office”: Recruiting and Job Search in a Local Clerical Labor Market

In this paper I investigate local labor-market processes which are associated with clerical employment in the financial and business services. I use a case study of Columbus, Ohio, to examine the process by which individual workplaces go about recruiting women workers and how women search for paid work. This process is viewed from the perspectives of employers and women clerical workers through the interpretation of a questionnaire survey of a sample of workplaces, and interactive interviews with personnel managers and women employed as clerical workers. I analyze the strategies that establishments utilize to recruit clerical workers and the job-search methods of the women interviewed. The results indicate that formal techniques of hiring and searching (for example, newspaper advertisements and temporary agencies) are particularly important, but informal methods (for example, personal contacts) are also very significant. The popularity of these techniques varies by location within the metropolitan area. Downtown locations for establishments and women employees are much more likely to be associated with formal methods, whereas informal methods are more popular in suburban workplaces. I argue that these processes illustrate that employers and women are enmeshed in a complex web of localized sociospatial relations and networks in their efforts to fill positions and find jobs.