A Study On The Engagement Strategies Employed On Company Career Websites From The Perspective Of Social Semiotics

As one of the important platforms for potential employees to make the initial contact with companies,career websites play an important role in the initial stage of employee socialization.Therefore,it would be of great academic significance to study how companies promote employees’ socialization process at the discourse level on career websites.In applied linguistics,engagement refers to how the writer or speaker rhetorically acknowledges the presence of the readers or listeners in a text,staging a dialogue with them and finally achieving the purpose of aligning them.It provides a useful and novel perspective to investigate how companies promote employees’ socialization process at the discourse level on career websites.At present,research on engagement in linguistic field mainly centers on academic discourse,political news discourse,less on business discourse.Therefore,taking a social semiotic approach,based on Hyland’s engagement model,Martin and White’s engagement system,the interactive framework in visual grammar and the synthetic framework for MDA,this study attempts to investigate how20 best employer companies employ two main semiotic modes on career websites,i.e.verbal texts and their related visual images,to construct intersemiotic engagement strategies,which help transmit corporate cultures and values to the potential employees and thus promote their socialization process.Results showed that: 1)In the verbal mode,companies mainly engage their potential employees in a more direct way,which is manifested by the prevalence of such explicit engagement markers as reader pronouns,directives and questions;2)In the visual mode,they engage the potential employees in a relatively indirect way,which is manifested by the prevalent existence of offer images in which the represented participants do not directly gaze at the potential viewers;however,most of represented participants in visual images are given a close,frontal and equal shot,suggesting that they share a kind of intimate and equal relationship with the potential viewers;3)Both the two semiotic modes do not engage the potential employees alone.Instead,they are related to each other in terms of complementary or non-complementary relationship,working hand in hand to engage the potential employees and promote their socialization process.The current research on intersemiotic engagement strategies employed by companies on career websites,on the one hand enriches the research on corporateemployee communication discourse,and on the other hand brings some enlightenment to companies in promoting employee socialization at discourse level in recruitment campaigns.