Introduction

This chapter provides a theoretical framework for analyzing conversational data derived from job interviews and reports a case study using such a framework. Our data derive from simulated interviews given to 12 Afro-American students of a CETA (Comprehensive Employment and Training Act) job training program in Oakland, California in the summer of 1978. Our goal is to highlight those communicative conditions that can lead to negative evaluation in stressful speech encounters like job interviews.

We describe (1) the structural and communicative characteristics of the job interview, (2) the nature and inferential implications of interview questions, and (3) the nature of communicative tasks, showing how interview conversation differs from ordinary conversation. We then go on to compare the responses of two candidates to a similar set of interview questions, using three major parameters of communicative effectiveness in interview conversation: stylistic expectations, content, and underlying patterns. The comparison shows how the accretion of ethnic discourse features that diverge from established conventions of interview talks leads to a negative evaluation of one of the candidates.

The job interview

The interview as a kind of conversation is probably as old as language itself. In its simplest form, it is prototypically manifested as an interrogative encounter between someone who has the right or privilege to know and another in a less powerful position who is obliged to respond, rather defensively, to justify his/her action, to explain his/her problems, to give up him/herself for evaluation. (God's interview of Adam after the latter had eaten the forbidden fruit provides an archetype.