A Pragmatic Study On Chinese And English Recruitment Advertisements From The Perspective Of The Adaptation Theory

Recruitment advertisement, as a common means of recruitment communication betweenrecruiters and job seekers, is of great value and significance to both the recruiting organization’and the potential applicants, especially in todays society with fierce talent competition. On theone hand, the company aims to attract and recruit the best match for their wanting openings, onthe other, the job hunter tends to find the best position for them, in order to accomplish a win-winsituation.Based on Versch’uerens Adaptation Theory, by analyzing the recruitment advertisinglanguage, adopting a qualitative study with a constrained data chosen from two professionalrecruitment websites home and abroad respectively: www.51job.com and www.monster.com, thisstudy attempts to explain how language choice-making realizes the adaptation to the mental world,as well as the adaptation to the social world of communicators in Chinese and English recruitmentadvertisements.It is found out that in terms of mental world, through language choice-making, emotiveelements including the need for shortened psychological distance and the caring andindiscrimination of the company, with cognitive elements including the need for detailed positioninformation, comprehensive company information, sound employee development, preferableworking environment and effective action-taking guideline are taken into full consideration andactively adapted. In terms of the social world, language choices are actively made to adapt to thetarget social group, social norms as well as social culture and settings in recruitment advertising.As a result, it is suggested that when writing recruitment advertisements, the recruiter shouldnot only pay attention to emotive and cognitive factors of the applicants, but also the social norms,culture, and target group feature. Social applicants and campus applicants should be given withequal consideration and attention, and fairness statement need to be presented in Chineserecruitment advertisements to reach a better recruitment effect.