David Bills
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
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
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.
Jeremy Reynolds
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.