Introduction

Graduate job interviews are a pivotal event in the transition from university to the professions. Because studies of interaction are rare in this context, the influence of current organisational discourses on how participants (re)create norms and practices in these gatekeeping encounters remains largely unexplored. Efforts to render the recruitment process more transparent and accessible to students through clearer definitions of employment competency criteria have highlighted the increasing importance placed on soft skills in the global workplace and the high priority of teamwork on employers’ wish lists. Teamwork is explicitly thematised as a skill and an associated discourse in graduate job interviews, but discursive norms for talking about teamwork experiences remain relatively opaque. This aspect of the employment competency framework has specific potential to obstruct candidates’ progress in the transition to the professional workplace. A closer look at the activities of interviewers and interviewees in articulating the experience of teamwork in line with bureaucratic expectations and discursive norms will reveal why. For example:

The incident related by Hari is not only useful in highlighting and defining a particular challenge to candidates in graduate recruitment interviews, it also illustrates how extreme (or explicit) the strategies that professionals draw on to monitor expert/ novice boundaries in a situated institutional practice can be. The story of a visiting HR manager who lost his cool when interviewing a student appears to have achieved somewhere between anecdotal and apocryphal status among Hari's peers, as it was also mentioned by other students who had been alarmed, as well as amused, by the force of this reaction to an unsubstantiated claim about skills.