Abstract
This book aims to elucidate whether and how the work of contingency search firms has changed since the authors’ first investigation of the topic (Finlay & Coverdill, 2002). From archival and interview data—1,106 industry publications articles and interviews with 33 headhunters, 7 of whom were also informants for the first book—a fascinating case study emerges of an occupation markedly shaped by the evolutions of the last 20 years.
In the first part, the authors dissect the work practices of this occupation. Now as was the case 20 years ago, they find, headhunting is a sales occupation. The work remains fundamentally composed of a double sale: cultivating clients and securing job orders on the one hand and locating and convincing suitable candidates to take those jobs on the other hand. Successful recruits still come from sales jobs in other domains, especially office products and supplies, or workers in customer-service jobs with long hours, low pay, and good relational skills. They trigger deals by producing a deluge of calls and e-mails to prospective clients with the goal to create—and not just meet—demand for new employees. In contrast to the authors’ prior book, however, what truly stands out now is the extent to which headhunters trade in “high touch” information.
Rich and timely information is what generates a viable hiring process for headhunters. There is information about the job, such as the mix of experience and skill sought, the cultural match with the company, and the elements of chemistry with the hiring manager (because it is not “Georgia Pacific but Bob in a particular unit” who does the hiring, p. 25). There are also the catchy details of the new job (e.g., its location, culture, or novel challenges) that are highlighted in presentations to worthy passive candidates to lure them into the market and keep them engaged and enthusiastic throughout the hiring process. Underlying this is a shared belief that people’s needs are always in flux, so that it is only through the right information at the right time that good matches between candidates and jobs can happen. Take away this kind of high-touch information and headhunters would be, in the words of one informant, “blind monkeys with a handful of darts” (p. 66).
Of course, blind monkeys with darts come close to how headhunters see the electronic people management and hiring systems which have shaped the landscape of the occupation in recent years and to which the book turns in the second half where three technological transformations are discussed.
The first transformation is the widespread adoption of employment portals by large companies. Portals centralize and formalize the employment process but, in doing so, remove the idiosyncratic elements of information that headhunters need about a position, its history, and associated social context, and increase the distance between headhunters and hiring managers. The second transformation is the rise of social media platforms, in particular LinkedIn, for sourcing candidates. The network has been embraced enthusiastically by headhunters for identifying possible candidates. It has also increased the occupation’s sense of vulnerability, as open access to basic candidate information sometimes pitches headhunters against the clients’ own in-house talent acquisitions teams. Nevertheless, headhunters feel confident that they retain an edge over in-house professionals in locating candidates’ “wounds” (reasons for wanting to leave a current employment situation) and selling these candidates on new opportunities. Finally, headhunters are confronted by the advent of electronic marketplaces—the platforms that bring together headhunters and companies who wish to engage them to fill positions. These platforms promise efficiency but are seen by headhunters as undermining their effectiveness by rewarding speed and quantity of prospects submitted over quality, cultural fit, and willingness to come. In response, headhunters resort to using marketplaces as outlets for low-effort candidates—those already in their database or by-products of recent searches—while saving fresh searches for clients they know and trust.
The authors also sketch a backdrop of larger trends in employer practices as spawned by the Great Recession and generational shifts in communication practices. However, I found the book particularly compelling in showing how the occupation is coping with the big technological innovations confronting it. While LinkedIn has changed some work practices, it has left the essence of headhunting intact: “Technology identifies. Human beings recruit” (p. 102). In contrast, portals and marketplaces challenge the fundamental assumptions about the nature of human beings and relationships that sit at the core of this occupation.
In sum, this is a fascinating and consequential look into the behavior of one group who sits on the fault line between the impending forces changing the face of the labor market as we know it. The rich descriptions speak to the evolution of an occupation under the impact of technology. But the book also hints to broader repercussions for the matching of people and jobs: the specter of polarized labor markets, with headhunters selling premium candidates and marketplaces processing commodity ones, loomed large for me while reading it. The book is a most useful complement to recent broad treatments of the changing nature of hiring processes in society and will be of interest to any scholar following the evolution of labor market processes in our society.