Alignment talk in the job interview

Abstract

The research reported here describes aligning talk in simulated employment interviews. Alignment talk is used metacommunicatively by speakers to bracket, transform, or qualify other talk, hence it assumes great importance in how communicators define and evaluate situations. Four features of alignment talk appear both in the scholarly literature and in the speech of interview participants in our data: accounts, meta‐talk, formulations, and qualifiers. Each of these features are described in the present report, and their uses in job interviews are explored. It is concluded that these devices serve to accentuate role differences between interviewer and applicant, and to enforce rather stringent norms of how one talks in the job interview. Implications for interviewing practice are discussed.