Migration, ethnicity and competing discourses in the job interview: synthesizing the institutional and personal

Abstract

This article, based on a unique data set of video-recorded job interviews, examines the institutional and personal discourses of the competency-based interview and how their synthesis produces an `authentic self '. The interview's requirement for the synthesis of work-based and personal identities is particularly disadvantaging to foreign-born minority ethnic candidates. Foreign-born candidates often lack access to British `job interview English' because of unemployment, marginalization in ethnic work units and the dominant culture's `othering' of their identity. Examples of candidates producing a convincing synthetic persona are contrasted with unsuccessful candidates whose `lack' of synthesization marks them as having a hybrid identity. They are judged by interviewers as `inconsistent', `untrustworthy' and non-belongers to the organization. Because there is little relationship between the required discursive skill of interviewees and the actual demands of the job, the interview ritual is as much about constructing the institution as it is about the fair and effective selection of candidates.

Talking yourself into work: insights from sociolinguistics about gender and the employment interview

“…Roberts and Campbell (2005) and Campbell and Roberts (2007), in their research into job interviews with migrants to the UK, extend the work of Gumperz and his colleagues on these inferential processes by linking them to current organizational discourses around the job interview.…”

“…Nevertheless, these authors' analysis of candidates' job interview talk and how interviewers judge it also recall the findings about language and gender derived from feminist linguistics research, and feminist findings about women's experience of work. We demonstrate this in the next section, where we summarize and present a short re-analysis of Campbell and Roberts' (2007) data under three headings which pertain equally to gender: the competence of impersonality, the competence of personal disclosure, and the claim to belong.…”

“…Revisiting a previous study : Campbell and Roberts, 2007 This section shows how the CA analysis of Campbell and Roberts (2007) juxtapositions of personal and institutional modes of speaking and identities, and that their talk showed an inadequate synthesis of personal and institutional discourses. Candidates could be judged unfavourably by producing rote-learned 'textbook' answers that used buzzwords but did not employ the candidates' own voice.…”

“…CA yields complex, detailed understandings about how a candidate's speech leads to favourable or unfavourable assessments of them during the employment interview. Campbell and Roberts' (2007) study that examined intercultural employment interviews is re-analysed from a gender perspective. The re-analysis finds that some aspects of what is often stereotypically considered 'women's language' -aspects which conflict with the 'rules' of interview performance -are likely to lead to unfavourable assessments of women as potential employees.…”

“…Institutional language, according to Bourdieu (1991), is characterized by 'impartiality, symmetry, balance, propriety, decency and discretion', and by the creation of a certain professional distance between the people using it. Auer (1998) (5) and then we have to give them back to the customers (6) Source: This and all subsequent natural language extracts are from Campbell and Roberts (2007).…”