A sociolinguistic-pragmatic study of recruiters' identity construction and impression management in job interviews

This dissertation scrutinizes the job interview from a linguistic perspective, which is quite unexpected as job interviews are typically regarded as a domain of study for applied psychology. However, job interviews are fundamentally interactional, making them a fit research topic for linguistic interactional studies as well. Moreover, the recruitment context is changing significantly, making research with a focus on the impact of these changes on the linguistic elements of job interviews highly worthwhile. On the one hand, the New Work Order has been changing the outlook on job interviews from a formal gatekeeping encounter to a more personalized and (seemingly) egalitarian setting. On the other hand, there is also a War for Talent waging in large parts of Western organizational life. Flanders, where the data for this project were collected, follows these international trends. While the impact of the New Work Order has been charted quite extensively in linguistic workplace studies, the War for Talent has not received significant attention in this literature. We hypothesized that the scarcity in the labor market, especially acute in certain sectors, could change the gatekeeping process of the job interview to a bi-directional process. This could then result in different strategic identity constructions by recruiters - which we described as a crucially 'indexical' process. More specifically, recruiters now no longer just have to evaluate candidates, but also have to convince candidates to choose their company as their next employer. The two key aims of this dissertation are (1) scrutinizing recruiters' indexical markers of identity in relation to the New Work Order and the War for Talent and (2) relating this to recruiters' efforts to manage their image and make certain impressions on candidates in light of the bi-directional gatekeeping process in job interviews. In this mixed-methods doctoral research, we included three methodological phases to analyze real-life data from a dataset of 94 job interviews recorded for the purposes of this research project. The first two phases were associated with the first key aim. In a first, broad exploratory phase, we used a pragmatic discourse analytical approach to scrutinize subsets from our larger dataset. More specifically, in three case studies we looked at the identity construction of recruiters through several discursive and semiotic elements holding indexical potential for identity construction: founding stories