Rapport-building attempts in technology-mediated job interviews during the COVID-19 crisis

1 Introduction

During the COVID-19 crisis, many institutional interactions – such as meetings, job interviews, and appraisal interviews – moved to a digital medium, leading to a vast increase in technology-mediated encounters throughout the world. Research on technology-mediated interaction (TMI) can be broadly grouped into two different approaches. On the one hand, many studies compare TMI with face-to-face interaction and focus on the limiting nature of the digital medium (Hollan and Stornetta 1992). For example, Markman (2009) describes the difficulties inherently connected with chat-based meetings, Luff et al. (2014) illustrate the challenges for teams working with meeting technology, and various studies, across different interactional forms and types of technology, point to the fact that interlocutors may be hindered by the more limited access to body language, facial expressions, gaze, and so on (e.g., Kangasharju 1996; Oittinen 2018). On the other hand, there is also a tendency to move away from what is often referred to as the “deficiency perspective” and look at TMI in its own right (Arminen et al. 2016; Arvedsen and Hassert 2020; Hollan and Stornetta 1992; Meredith 2017). In this paper, we look at technology-mediated interaction through the lens of the concept of “affordances” (Bucher and Helmond 2017; Gibson 1979; Hutchby 2001). This concept has been used in a wide variety of ways (Bucher and Helmond 2017), but we follow Hutchby in defining affordances as the “functional and relational aspects which frame, while not determining, the possibilities for agentive action in relation to an object” (2001: 444). A revealing distinction with regard to this concept is the division between “low-level” and “high-level” affordances, with the former referring to medium-specific elements such as a like button or chat function and the latter to more general “dynamics and conditions enabled by technical devices, platforms and media” (Bucher and Helmond 2017: 12). In this contribution, our outlook on TMI holds the middle between the perspective on technology as shaping the interaction on the one hand, and the potential of agentive action by the interactional participants on the other.

When it comes to video-mediated job interviews specifically, research from an HR perspective shows that interviewer ratings of applicants and applicant reactions to the interviews are more negative for technology-mediated job interviews (TMJIs) when compared to face-to-face interviews (Blacksmith et al. 2016). To explain these more negative ratings, researchers among others refer to the shortening of the “rapport-building stage” (Blacksmith et al. 2016: 13). Rapport can be defined as “a way of establishing connections and negotiating relationships” (Tannen 1990: 111) and one of the well-described ways to create it is the use of small talk, a “conventionalized and peripheral mode of talk” (Coupland 2000: 1). A lack of rapport is indeed not without consequences in gatekeeping encounters such as job interviews, as the success of such encounters can be attributed among others to the interlocutors’ abilities to develop a positive rapport with one another (Kerekes 2006). As such, the overall expectation is that it is not beneficial for the quality and outcome of the job interview if the rapport-building phase is curtailed, as seems to be the case for digital job interviews.

For this study, we aim to investigate how attempts at rapport-building may be made by recruiters in digital job interviews recorded during the COVID-19 crisis. As we focus specifically on rapport, we zoom in on the start of the job interviews, where we may expect to find some rapport-building, with small talk often occurring as a “boundary marker” at the beginning of transactional talk (Holmes and Stubbe 2015). Moreover, we specifically look at potential “worst-case scenarios”, in the sense that we select opening fragments from digital job interviews in which the establishment of the “participation framework” (Goffman 1981) was problematic due to technical issues, thus making it more challenging to engage in rapport-building. Following Rintel, we scrutinize these distorted segments by focusing on the way “users manage those issues as part of the conversational business” (2013a: 2). More specifically, we zoom in on how interviewers may insert rapport-building efforts in the transitional space that follows the technical problem and precedes the return to the “progressivity” (Oittinen 2018: 41) of the job interview.

2 Data and method

We collected a corpus of 41 naturally occurring TMJIs conducted at eight different companies in Belgium after the start of the COVID-19 crisis (marked by the first Belgian lockdown that started on 13 March 2020). The interviews were in Dutch or English and were fully transcribed using simplified Jeffersonian transcription conventions (Jefferson 1984). In line with our research question, we selected interviews for further analysis in which, on the one hand, establishing contact at the start of the interview was problematic due to problems with the internet connection or other technical issues, and, on the other hand, there were nevertheless attempts to build rapport. In this paper we present analyses of interview-initial fragments from two Dutch job interviews that were recorded at the same company:

1. In the first job interview, a female recruiter (R1) interviews a male candidate (C1) for a junior IT position.

2. In the second job interview, the female recruiter from the first interview (R1) and another, male, recruiter (R2) together interview a male candidate (C2) for a senior IT position.

When it comes to TMI, it is of crucial importance to describe the visual aspect of the interaction to understand it fully. The recruiters recorded the interviews by means of the videoconferencing software that was selected by the recruiters for the job interview itself. During the interview, the software allowed the participants to see themselves and the other participant(s). However, in the second job interview the male recruiter indicates that he can only see the candidate – and thus can hear but cannot see the female recruiter – due to technical problems. The recordings that were made for this research capture the audio for all interlocutors, but do not always display the video image for all participants: in the first fragment we see both interlocutors side by side (see Figure 1), but in the second fragment the video image only displays the person speaking (see Figure 2). That limited view for the second fragment of course restricted the possibilities for our analyses, but the decision to collect data this way was made deliberately: this setup allowed us to capture these data in a nonintrusive and naturalistic way (Rintel 2007).

Figure 1:

Researcher view for fragment 1 – side by side image for R1 and C1.

Figure 2:

Researcher view for fragment 2 – the speaker is featured in a single image (in this case R2).

For our analyses, we use a micro-oriented multimodal discourse analytical approach which has proven suitable for this goal (for a discussion, see Van De Mieroop 2020). This means that we focus on sequential features^[1] and discursive elements such as boosters, hedges, pronominal forms, and lexical choices that contribute in important ways to the negotiation of meaning between the interlocutors. Next to this, we also pay attention to the multimodal resources that are invoked by the participants and how these interact with the other, verbal resources^[2] in this particular digital context. We integrate these aspects into a holistic analysis, which we discuss in the following section.

3 Analyses

As mentioned above, we focus particularly on interview extracts following technical issues at the start of job interviews. The structure of these interview-initial fragments is very similar, as the technical issues are followed by a metapragmatic discussion of the situation in both cases. We present both fragments below, each time showing our turn-by-turn analysis on a micro level, which focuses on the talk and embodied behavior of the participants during the transition from the technical issue to the restoration of the participation framework (Goffman 1981) and which particularly teases out the discursive processes that can be related to rapport-building efforts. These analyses are followed by a more general discussion of the way in which these transitional moments take shape in each fragment.

The first fragment starts right after the phase in which the recruiter and the candidate are trying to establish contact with each other, which is at first rather challenging. After 32 s^[3] of trying out the connection, the interaction occurs as shown in fragment 1 below.

In the first nine lines of this fragment, the recruiter is the only interactant who can be heard on the recording. After 32 s of trying out the connection, the interaction occurs as shown in fragment 1 below (see Figure 3). In that way she implicitly acknowledges her own potential part in the technological issues, before she turns to the candidate’s potential share of the issue, with ‘your side’ in lines 5 and 6. Instead of asking outright whether the candidate can solve the problem himself, she formulates her question in a mitigated way by preempting her statement with an “expression of uncertainty” (Félix-Brasdefer 2008; ‘I don’t know’, l.5). In lines 8 and 9 she offers an explanation for the sound issues that has to do with the meeting settings.

Then the candidate utters some turns probing for (l.10) and confirming (l.12) the quality of the connection. These are met with positive responses by the recruiter, who uses two Extreme Case Formulations (Pomerantz 1986; ‘perfectly’, l.11 and ‘super’, l.13) signaling her helpful tone. This is followed by a metapragmatic comment by the recruiter (l.14–15) about the process of establishing the connection that just took place. In line 15 she clarifies her initial statement by making explicit that she is referring to the digital context in particular (‘virtually’). She implicitly makes the pandemic relevant by indicating that this situation is forced upon (‘have to’) a referentially vague ‘we’. With the tag he (‘eh’, l.14) in the preceding line, the recruiter makes “common ground salient in the context of the current topic” (Jucker and Smith 1996: 9) and solicits a response from the candidate, which he offers in line 17 by affirming the statement made by the recruiter.

After some reciprocating laughter in lines 16–18 (see Figure 4), the recruiter formulates a second metapragmatic comment in which she stresses more explicitly that organizing job interviews digitally is not the preferred option for her (‘such a shame’) and that she has no choice in the matter (‘it has to be’), in which it is of course implied once more that this is due to the pandemic. Subsequently, the recruiter contrasts (ma ‘but’, l.19) her earlier more negative remarks about the digital medium with a more positive concluding remark introduced by the topic-closing marker bon (‘well’). Here she focuses on a low-level affordance (Bucher and Helmond 2017) of TMJIs, when compared for instance with telephone interviews, of being able to see each other. In contrast to the initial vagueness of the ‘we’ in line 15, this ‘we’ is clearly an inclusive we-form, referring to the recruiter and the candidate, and as such it subtly makes relevant the shared experience of using the digital medium for a job interview. In the following lines (which are omitted here for reasons of space), the recruiter returns to the progressivity of the core business talk (Oittinen 2018) by asking for a self-presentation by the candidate.

In sum, this first fragment starts out with the recruiter trying to look for a way to establish the connection: she checks her own settings, very carefully prompts the candidate to check his own settings, and offers an explanation for the issues linked to an external factor (i.e., the meeting settings), thus presenting both participants as “blame free”. Then mutual feedback about the connection follows: the fact that it is given so explicitly is typical of technology-mediated interactions, as other clues that might inform the interlocutors are missing in the digital context (Arminen et al. 2016). We finally see the recruiter easing the transition towards core business talk by means of metapragmatic comments, of which the first one results in reciprocating laughter. During the transition the recruiter switches from stressing the force of circumstances – thus making the pandemic implicitly relevant – and framing the technical medium as a constraint, to hinting at the low-level affordance of ‘seeing each other’. This conveys a positive message and emphasizes sharedness in using the digital medium for a job interview in COVID-19 times. We have thus observed the recruiter acting as an encouraging facilitator, in the lead of agentive problem-solving, and, by drawing on sharedness, making an implicit attempt at building some form of rapport. We now turn to the second fragment, which again starts in a troublesome way after which a short metapragmatic discussion about the digital medium ensues.

Very similar to fragment 1, this fragment starts with connection issues which are referred to smilingly (see Figure 5) in line 1 by recruiter 2 who states that he can hear but cannot see recruiter 1. Recruiter 1 explicitly makes relevant her share in the technical issues when she utters a statement about her accountability (l.3), which she not only embodies adopting an apologetic facial expression (see Figure 6), but for which she also apologizes explicitly (l.4). She frames TMI in a rather negative way in lines 5 to 8 (omitted here for reasons of space), but then contrasts this (ma ‘but’) with a more positive remark that concludes the discussion, as signaled by the topic-closing marker bon (‘well’). She then initiates a general small talk frame (‘how are you’, l.10) to which the candidate responds in general terms, mirroring the recruiter’s informal tone (l.11–12). After a brief pause (l.11), the candidate self-selects and spontaneously offers more personal information by describing his new housing situation using a Dutch expression huisje tuintje, which refers to “prototypical suburbanness” (“prototype … van burgerlijkheid”; Den Boon and Hendrickx 2015). Recruiter 1 then smilingly (see Figure 7) initiates a more specific small talk frame probing for the candidate’s health in line 14, to which the candidate responds positively in line 15. In line 16 the recruiter expands the scope of her inquiry to the candidate’s family and friends and she links up this topic with the current situation (deze tijden ‘these times’), thus semi-explicitly making the pandemic relevant for the interaction.

In line 18 the second recruiter takes the floor and picks up his colleague’s temporal frame of reference (using nu ‘now’). He then connects it to the candidate’s earlier utterance in line 13 about having ‘a garden’ (nen tuin, l.19), interpreting the expression huisje tuintje (‘garden house’) literally and framing having a garden in positive terms (heel prettig ‘very nice’, l.20). This positive evaluation is then linked explicitly to the pandemic in line 21, after which he stresses the comfort of having a garden once more (l.22). He then underlines this further by contrasting the candidate’s housing situation to the situation of living in a small space (using the diminutive appartementje ‘little apartment’, l.23). In line 24, the second recruiter then finally concludes (dus ‘thus’) that the candidate’s living situation is comfortable, with which the candidate agrees in line 25.

In the course of the second recruiter’s turn starting in line 18, he gradually changes the orientation of his utterances: at first, he refers to the effects of the current situation (‘now’, l.18 and 19) on ‘people’ (l.18), describing the pandemic as a situation that determines the priorities for everyone in general. In line 21, he again refers to the current situation (‘now’, ‘these corona times’) and its consequences for a generalized ‘you’, which refers back to ‘people’. Such a generalized framing typically “includes the speaker, and engages, either directly or implicitly, the addressee” (Stirling and Manderson 2011: 1600). By describing ‘corona times’ as a situation in which ‘people’, and in particular the speaker and the addressee as suggested by the generalized ‘you’, share the same opinion regarding what is important in terms of housing conditions, he emphasizes sharedness between himself and the candidate, thus engaging in an attempt to build rapport. The referent of this you-form then gradually shifts from generalized to addressee-oriented in the course of the following lines, resulting in line 24 in a you-form that clearly addresses the candidate, when the recruiter makes a compliment (Mirivel and Fuller 2017) about the candidate’s housing situation (‘you are well off’). The positive nature of this turn is also embodied by the speaker’s smiling expression (see Figure 8). The candidate corroborates this evaluation in line 25, after which the second recruiter shifts the focus of the interaction back to the main activity, thus orienting to the progressivity of the job interview.

Overall, in this second job interview, we observe recruiter 1 acting in an accountable way taking full responsibility for the technical issues and transitioning away from the interactional problems by metapragmatic comments about the medium, after which both recruiters engage in rapport-building efforts. First, recruiter 1 initiates a small talk frame which is initially quite general but later on becomes focused on health and ‘these times’. Then recruiter 2 adds to this by linking up with one of the candidate’s earlier statements. He not only makes an affiliative move by complimenting the candidate (Mirivel and Fuller 2017), in this case on his housing situation, but he also constructs an in-group in relation to the pandemic through the generalized you-form. Hence the attempts at rapport-building in this fragment are mainly oriented to (temporary) priorities – such as the importance of one’s own and one’s friends and family’s health or of having a garden – which are related to the specific circumstances of the pandemic of which the shared nature is implicitly underlined. What is striking in terms of the embodied conduct of the participants throughout this short fragment is that the recruiters smile repeatedly (see Figures 5, 7, and 8), which not only embodies their reassuring and facilitating role in overcoming technical issues (see also Niedenthal 2018), but which also nonverbally contributes to their rapport-building efforts.

4 Discussion and conclusions

In our introduction we discussed research from an HR perspective on TMJIs that hypothesizes the limiting effect of the digital medium on rapport-building in a study based on participant ratings (Blacksmith et al. 2016). In this study, we aimed to counter this type of research by focusing on naturalistic data in the form of authentic TMJIs. We particularly zoomed in on interviews with a problematic start due to technical issues in order to tease out potential rapport-building processes in these deficiency-ridden sequences. Our analyses show that these opening sequences did not result in interactional worst-case scenarios (Arminen et al. 2016) – as we hypothetically framed them in the introduction – because these challenging interview segments were agentively transformed by the recruiters into sequences in which attempts to establish rapport are made. As such, our findings coincide with earlier research that emphasizes the low- and high-level affordances of TMI and the agency of the participants engaged in mediated discourse (Hutchby 2001; Rintel 2013b).

In particular, in the restoration of the participation framework (Goffman 1981) in fragment 1, we could observe an interesting process: at first, contact is established through “outspoken communication” where both interlocutors provide each other feedback about the connection (Arvedsen 2021). Then the interviewer – often the person in control of the interaction (Akinnaso and Ajirotutu 1983; Hudson 2016) – makes metapragmatic comments about the digital medium and implicitly links the medium to the pandemic. Through this, she not only invokes sharedness and potentially builds rapport, but she also shifts from a negative to a positive frame in the course of these comments. From this positive frame a return to the progressivity of the job interview is then initiated. A similar pattern is found in the second job interview, but it is extended as illustrated in our analysis of fragment 2 where the interviewers introduce a more elaborate small talk episode concerning the pandemic. This is in line with research on diverging contexts which shows the importance of the pandemic as a small talk topic during COVID-times (e.g., Gibbs 2020; Joseph et al. 2021; Rosenberg et al. 2021). That is not surprising at all, as, during the initial phase of the pandemic in which our data were recorded, this was a topic with a similar “social and relational utility” as talk about the weather, due to “its ubiquitous availability to speakers, and its ability to achieve consensus” (Coupland and Ylänne-McEwen 2000: 171).^[4] Thus, small talk about the pandemic can also be considered as a flexible resource to attempt to establish rapport and to ease the transition towards the transactional frame (Coupland et al. 1992; Holmes 2000).

It is thus clear that interviewers can play a crucial role in restoring the participation framework after a disruption. While outspoken communication is used by all interlocutors, the interviewers are the ones taking the lead in establishing the participation framework and facilitating the interaction by refraining from laying blame with the candidates and acting in an accountable way themselves, by uttering metapragmatic comments, and by engaging in attempts to build rapport. They use talk in general for these purposes and initiate small talk in particular, while also making use of the visual affordance of the medium through their embodied behavior that generally emphasizes their positive stance (e.g., the repeated smiling in both fragments). In this way, this paper has shed more light on what the transition process from technical issues to fluid interaction can look like in TMI: even though the deficiency perspective on TMI is talked into being in the interaction itself through initially negative metapragmatic comments, the interviewers also counter this immediately afterwards. We have shown that they do this by displaying successful agentive problem-solving and facilitative behavior to restore the interaction, while not failing to exploit the rapport-building potential of this initial phase of the job interview, in particular by capitalizing on sharedness and making relevant what we could call a “pandemic collectivity”.