ILR Press High Tech and High Touch: Headhunting, Technology, and Economic Transformation

In High Tech and High Touch, James E. Coverdill and William Finlay invite readers into the dynamic world of headhunters, personnel professionals who acquire talent for businesses and other organizations on a contingent-fee basis. In a high-tech world where social media platforms have simplified direct contact between employers and job seekers, Coverdill and Finlay acknowledge, it is relatively easy to find large numbers of apparently qualified candidates. However, the authors demonstrate that headhunters serve a valuable purpose in bringing high-touch search into the labor market: they help parties on both sides of the transaction to define their needs and articulate what they have to offer. As well as providing valuable information for sociologists and economists, High Tech and High Touch demonstrates how headhunters approach practical issues such as identifying and attracting candidates; how they solicit, secure, and evaluate search assignments from client companies; and how they strive to broker interactions between candidates and clients to maximize the likelihood that the right people land in the right jobs. Review "Are headhunters still the corporate kingmakers in the digital age? High Tech and High Touch shows that predictions of their demise at the hands of online recruiting have been vastly exaggerated. How they adapted to new technology provides important lessons for other fields. A must-read for anyone interested in careers and executives." Author: Peter Cappelli, author of Talent on Demand "You might think that LinkedIn, Indeed, and other sites aimed to help connect the employer with the potential employee have put headhunters out of work. Far from it―Coverdill and Finlay’s engaging study of headhunters today shows how important social interactions and social knowledge are to the complicated task of matching job candidate with hiring manager. This welcome sequel to their earlier book, Headhunters, tells a captivating story about how we are all such complicated creatures that not all jobs can be easily replaced by robots or search algorithms." Author: Ilana Gershon, author of Down and Out in the New Economy "High Tech and High Touch is a worthy successor to Headhunters. As James E. Coverdill and William Finlay very convincingly argue, the role of headhunters is both undergoing transformation and deeply implicated in changing employment practices. Coverdill and Finlay show that much of what we might have thought about headhunters (about their inevitable demise, for instance) is largely wrong." Author: David Bills, author of The Sociology of Education and Work "High Tech and High Touch draws on rich qualitative data to tell the fascinating story of an occupation in turmoil. The book explains how headhunters remained valuable intermediaries between job providers and job seekers despite a social media revolution and a major recession. Moreover, by studying this unique occupation, the authors provide valuable insights into the modern labor market more generally. They show that despite the rise of LinkedIn and electronic job portals, hiring is a complex courtship in which cultural capital, emotional labor, inside information, and interpersonal trust still matter. The book should be on the reading list of anyone interested in labor markets, recruitment and hiring processes, occupational change, or the effects of recessions or social media." Author: Jeremy Reynolds, Purdue University About the Author James E. Coverdill is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Georgia. He is coauthor with William Finlay of Headhunters, also from Cornell. William Finlay is Professor and Head of the Department of Sociology at the University of Georgia and the author of Work on the Waterfront: Worker Power and Technological Change in a West Coast Port.