The Search Game: Organizational Conflicts and the Use of Headhunters

This article examines why companies use contingency headhunters (that is, headhunters who compete with one another to make placements and are paid only if they produce the successful job candidate) to find new employees. We find that headhunters provide economic and political advantages to hiring managers. The economic advantages consist of the techniques headhunters have devised for locating good candidates, especially those who are happily employed and not necessarily looking to change jobs. The political advantages consist of the ways in which headhunters' service to hiring managers enables the latter to strengthen their control over hiring and to ward off two challenges to their prerogatives: one from their own human resource departments and the other from clients and competitors from whom they recruit new employees. These findings are used to propose a modification of Glaser and Strauss's theory of “awareness contexts.”