Talent Intermediaries in Talent Acquisition

Talent intermediaries are entities that stand between the individual worker and the organization that needs work done. They include online intermediaries such as job boards or social networking sites, and search and placement firms such as executive search firms and temporary-help service firms. Talent intermediaries have an increasingly important role in the contemporary employment landscape: they influence not only how and which individuals are matched to organizations but also how tasks are performed or conflicts are resolved once talent is hired by the organization. This chapter reviews the already extensive literature on talent intermediaries, focusing on their role in the identification, assessment, and hiring of talent. The chapter shows the advantages that talent intermediaries present to the talent-acquisition process compared with hiring organizations and the ways in which their intermediation changes traditional talent-acquisition processes that involved only two parties: the job seeker and the hiring organization.