Conversation Analysis Of Job Interviews And Their Response Strategies

With the tough situation in the talent market, job interview has become a hot topic. There are plenty of studies paying special attention to applicants'preparation, dressing and body language, etc. However, they seldom study it from a perspective of linguistics, specificly, the structure of conversations in job interviews. The present paper tries to study the language structure from the perspective of conversation analysis. Meawhile, the author has noticed the power relations between interviewers and interviewees. That is, the relationship between the two participants is unequal and the interviewer can control the interviewee's actions. Then, in such a context, we explore the characteristics of conversations in job interviews. At last, some strategies for better response and some applications are given. The paper makes a detailed analysis of the features and functions of the job interviews with examples. Through the transcription of the records from five whole job interviews in the large companies, this study employs conversation analysis to analyze the interview transcripts and explores the response strategies.The theoretical framework is constructed on the basis of the theory proposed by Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson. The investigation concentrates on their conversational-structuring systems to apply to job interviews, namely, the turn-taking system, the adjacency pair system, as well as opening and closing system. Turn-taking system, one of the most influential discoveries in the study of conversation, is proposed by Sacks and his associates; they notice that conversational turn-allocation proceeds in an orderly matter, and there is some system or mechanism behind them. As for the conversations in iob interviews, the turns are pre-allocated and topics are predetermined, owing to their particular institutioanal discourse. That is, the interviewer has the right to manage the whole conversation process of the program. He gains a measure of control through the change of topics, the allocation of turns and interruptions.Pairs of utterances such as greeting-greeting and apology-acceptance are called adjacency pairs. The job interview employs a sort of question-answer format adjacency pairs.In terms of the overall organization of conversation, any complete conversation is made up of an opening, a body and a closing section, and different settings will generate different openings and closings. In the opening of a job interview, it mainly includes greeting, introduction or sometimes a small talk. As for the closing of a job interview, there are also topic-bounding sequence, pre-closing sequence, and closing sequence. Usually, the interviewees express their gratitude and expectations to enter the company.The significance of this study is that it provides some strategies for employees, such as, employing some backchannel signals to keep the turn. Also in order to avoid blind answers, they can insert some adjacency pairs to get more information. What's more, this study has three applications: to promote interviewees'awareness of the conversation structure in job interviews; to promote interviewees'ability to choose appropriate response strategies; to open a new area for the study of job interviews.