First impressions are lasting impressions: Small talk as an index of identity within elite job interviews

Abstract

First impressions made at the very beginning of a job interview, during greetings and small talk, form lasting impressions that impact hiring outcomes (Barrick, Swider & Stewart, 2010). In this paper I more closely examine how hiring decision-makers interpret these greeting/small talk exchanges, what identities they are inferring in regards to the candidates, and how these impressions reappear in the hirability judgements later in the hiring process. The paper forms part of an ongoing linguistic ethnographic study of Hong Kong and overseas university students applying for the most highly sought after graduate jobs with elite international firms. In this part of the study, business students from a Hong Kong university and Ivy League students were recorded for mock job interviews which were shown to hiring decision managers at elite international firms, who commented on students’ performances and hirability. Drawing on Mary Bucholtz and Kira Hall’s (2005) identity framework and Justine Coupland’s small talk work (2000, 2003; Coupland, Coupland & Robinson 1992), I analyzed the identity attributions made by these hiring decision makers and identified three themes, where initial comments on small talk were repeated in later evaluations of “substantive” answers or in overall evaluations. (1) Attributions of professional characteristics, particularly in relation to front-office, client-facing sales, and “communication skills”, formulated in terms that are ‘strategically deployable shifters’ (SDS): “expressions whose semantic value seems obvious yet is hard to pin down, and this semantic indeterminacy is a critical aspect of their use, given that their primary function is social alignment” (Urcioli, 2008: 214). The communication skills were typically judged against a global elite business English register (Militello, 2016), an enregistered (Agha 2003) “standard” that serves as an index of belonging to this global business elite community. (2) A related theme of similarity/difference (Bucholtz and Hall 2005) or in group/out group determination (Tajfel and Turner, 1979). Hiring decision-makers noted differences in students: in appearance before students spoke, in the way that they spoke, and what they said, often indexing an identity somewhere on the continuum between a ‘local’ out group identity or an ‘international’ in group identity. (3) A dispreference for phaticity. Small talk, as seen by Malinowski (1923) is mere “phatic communion”: something banal and bland said just to acknowledge the other person’s presence and avoid the awkwardness of silence. Later researchers have viewed small talk as a social diagnostic tool of identities (Laver, 1974, 1975, 1982) and a “speculative mechanism, specifying how speakers are able to stake claims about solidarity/intimacy and status relationships through particular encoding choices (Firth, 1972).” The negative evaluations of phaticity by hiring decisionmakers’ were expressed in their comments about the students being “vague”, or speaking in “platitudes”, or speaking in a prosodically routine manner. I conclude by commenting on the significance of small talk for linguistic gatekeeping in professional job interviews. References Agha, A. (2003). The social life of cultural value. Language & Communication, 23, 231-273. Barrick, M. R., Swider, B. W., & Stewart, G. L. (2010). Initial Evaluations in the Interview: Relationships with Subsequent Interviewer Evaluations and Employment Offers. Journal of Applied Psychology, 95(6), 1163-1172. doi:10.1037/a0019918 Bucholtz, M., & Hall, K. (2005). 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