Successful Communicative Strategies for Managing a Faculty Hiring Interview

Abstract

This paper investigates the job interview discourse during faculty staff hiring, in the Department of the English Language and Literature, within an EFL context. A discursive approach to the talk is applied to examine successful applicants’ communicative strategies to get positive feedback from their interviewers, according to the communicative purposes of the faculty hiring interview and requirements of an assistant lecturer position. To attain this goal, a micro-level discourse analysis considered extracts of twenty (N=20) job interviews that were recorded during real faculty hiring interviews held in English at two Algerian universities. Successful candidates were selected depending on their performance during four common interview phases: self-introduction, research presentation, negotiation of expertise and related position tasks, and discussing future plans. The qualitative analysis yielded an inventory of successful candidates’ communicative strategies that could be enhanced and introduced to design English for Specific Purposes (ESP) courses in for training students in interview communication.