Negotiating Solidarity: A Social-Linguistic Approach to Job Interviews

Negotiating Solidarity: A Social-Linguistic Approach to Job Interviews explores the linguistic co-construction of self-presentation in job interviews. It shows how candidates construct their professional identities, and establish co-membership and build rapport with their interviewers. Specifically, it illustrates how candidates enact their professional expertise and put their qualities forward, and highlights the linguistic features that succeed (or fail) to make a good impression on interviewers. Using extracts from authentic job interviews, Lipovsky illustrates the influence of candidates’ communicative styles on the impression they make on their interviewers, and the part that candidates’ semantic and lexico-grammatical choices play in defining the personal affinity between interviewer and candidate, and consequently in the hiring decision.