Seminar: On hiring via secondary employment affiliations

Our paper highlights the role of hiring via secondary employment affiliations as an emerging and underexplored practice when the targets are employees of other organizations. Descriptive and multivariate analyses of the population of hires in Sweden suggest that organizations learn better about prospective employees and achieve superior employment outcomes when engaging in hiring via secondary employment affiliations. In particular, larger salary increases, higher chances of promotion, and lower rates of inter-firm mobility are observed among those hires compared to conventional ones (i.e., employees who moved from another organization without a secondary employment affiliation). These differences appear most pronounced among younger and smaller firms. We elaborate on the conceptual implications of these findings for the relevant literature.