Hiring Expert Talent in a Recession: Targeted Labor Pool Sourcing and Firm Performance

John Kenneth Mawdsley (), Amit Chauradia () and Rhett Brymer ()

No 1211, HEC Research Papers Series from HEC Paris

Abstract: Extant research suggests that hiring experts during economic downturns can improve firm financial performance. However, recessionary labor markets deepen the challenges facing hiring firms, calling to question both the firm-level benefits and the tactics of acquiring talent when demand for a firm’s business is declining. We theorize and find that hiring expert talent during a recession actually weakens firm performance in the context of knowledge-based services. Notably though, we find firms can effectively attenuate the negative hiring effect by targeting particular labor pools, underlining the significance of gaining human capital advantages through focused sourcing. We test our hypotheses using a longitudinal sample of large U.S. corporate law firms between 2002 and 2010.

Keywords: human capital; firm performance; knowledge workers; labor pools; economic recession (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: L10 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 41 pages
Date: 2017-04-27
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec and nep-hrm
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2992548 Full text (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 410 Gone

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ebg:heccah:1211

DOI: 10.2139/ssrn.2992548

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in HEC Research Papers Series from HEC Paris HEC Paris, 78351 Jouy-en-Josas cedex, France. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Antoine Haldemann ().