High Tech and High Touch

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.

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 of Sociology at the University of Georgia. He is the author of Work on the Waterfront, coauthor of The Sociology of Work, and, with James Coverdill, coauthor of Headhunters, also from Cornell.

Finlay and Coverdill help shine a light on the social aspects of this market, in which personal characteristics matter more and the actively employed are potentially considered as candidates. Their work highlights that the full implications of the technological and cultural revolution undergirding the "new economy" are only beginning to be understood.

[High Tech and High Touch] provides a fascinating account of an infrequently studied profession at [a] significant moment in time that will deepen your understanding of how labor markets work.

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.... 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.

Jeremy Reynolds, Purdue University:

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.

David Bills, author of The Sociology of Education and Work:

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.

Ilana Gershon, author of Down and Out in the New Economy:

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.

Peter Cappelli, author of Talent on Demand:

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.