Headhunters are commonly used by organizations to help fill job vacancies. Research from Hiroshima University suggests, however, that while this may produce short-term benefits, they can also contribute to higher voluntary turnover as they can often turn to those candidates they successfully placed previously.

In Japan, foreign subsidiaries commonly use headhunters to recruit host country nationals (HCNs), and the researchers wanted to explore whether this practice is linked to employee turnover at all.

Familiar faces

The researchers quizzed 131 hiring managers and headhunters to understand how they find candidates as well as how those candidates do after they’re placed. The results suggest that candidates are often selected as a result of their age, gender, tenure, education level, English proficiency, and whether they’d been placed previously by headhunters.

This meant that preferred candidates were often younger than 50, with a bachelor’s degree and a strong level of English. The researchers used this finding to develop a model to test their hypothesis about the kinds of employees headhunters target and why these candidates leave after placement.

The hypothesis was then tested via a survey of over 450 HCNs working in foreign subsidiaries, which showed that prior placement was an extremely important factor. Indeed, headhunters can often recycle HCNs by moving them from one subsidiary to another.

“Organizations in domestic and international settings are increasingly relying on headhunters to recruit employees. However, very little focused research on headhunters has been conducted. Furthermore, research to date has focused primarily on the positive effects accompanied by recruiting through headhunters,” the researchers explain.

Increasing turnover

This often has the opposite impact, however, as it increases voluntary turnover. This was in large part because reaching out to past contacts they were taking the easy route rather than necessarily the best one. This results in HCNs being placed who were often most interested in job alternatives and become weakly embedded in their organizations.

This lack of job embeddedness was important and contributed to a higher likelihood of that individual leaving because they had fewer psychological and material reasons to stay.

The results show that employees who were not actively looking for work still ended up leaving after they were presented with better alternatives by headhunters. This was not the case for those with high job embeddedness, however, as they were more likely to stay due to the job fit and connections they had.

“Although previous research has been silent on the factors driving headhunter contacts, our findings show that they were influenced by HCNs’ age, gender, education, English proficiency, tenure and prior placement by headhunters,” the researchers explain.

“Along the same lines, more general evidence shows that age discrimination occurs in the labor market, and that retainer headhunting firms contribute to gender bias in managerial and professional labor markets by underrepresenting female candidates and contact individuals with university and professional degrees.”