Job interviews across borders

Moving between geographic and linguistic boundaries in order to find opportunities for personal and professional self-fulfilment is a common experience in the age of globalisation. Whether motivated by a personal choice, as is often the case with students and free movers, or by a political agenda, as is the case with asylum seekers and migrants from less developed countries, workforce mobility increasingly shapes our lives. The ‘job for life’ paradigm has become obsolete, since lifetime employment no longer suits the dynamics of globalisation and mobility. To keep pace, contemporary employees must muster not only practical skills of sustenance but also adequate linguistic competences, flexibility in a variety of contexts, and adaptiveness to challenges in space and time. These efforts are aggravated by employers who rely on employment strategies that do not account for candidates’ full range of potentials. One of the widely known methods for selection in professional contexts is the job interview. Employers use job interviews to determine whether a given person is suitable for a given job or not. Although candidates are required to have a solid set of qualifications to be selected for a job, it is usually what happens in the interactional moment that matters. In this sense the job interview is a ritual of power with rules often obscure to candidates.

To find out how candidates are selected for a job and to shed light on the intricacies of such a selection process, this chapter discusses and analyses data from two authentic job interviews conducted in Denmark. It focuses on the following two questions: first, what discourses develop in the communication between applicants and interviewers, especially when the interlocutors do not share a common first language; second, how do these discourses influence the interviewers’ assessments of applicants?

By answering these questions, the chapter provides insight into shortfalls in institutional selection processes within the field of migration studies and institutional communication in the age of globalisation. Through the concept of cultural fluency it also offers a more nuanced understanding of the ideology of intercultural communication in professional contexts.