Jul 17, 2020
This episode of Words and Actions starts with Veronika
mentioning that the chief adviser to the UK government, Dominic
Cummings, used his blog to ask “weirdos and misfits with odd
skills” and “true wild cards” to apply for a position as his
personal assistant. We also made the point that how much time
recruiters spend on filtering CVs is a matter of seconds. These two
studies provide evidence for this claim and suggest that the
initial time screening a CV has actually gone down from 30 seconds
to 6 seconds:
Barnum, C. M. (1987). Writing résumés that sell. Management
World, 16, 10-13.
Wallwork, A. (2019). English for Academic CVs, Resumes, and
Online Profiles. Springer, Cham.
As promised, here is the list of studies on unconscious bias
in recruitment decisions:
We focused on biased decisions with regard to ethnic
background, including that indicated by names. A recent study
is
Derous, E., & Ryan, A. M. (2019). When your resume is (not)
turning you down: Modelling ethnic bias in resume screening. Human
Resource Management Journal, 29(2), 113-130
while the following article looks at whether anonymous CVs
could be a solution (spoiler: possibly, but for high-status jobs,
ethnicity tends to matter less to begin with):
Lacroux, A., & Martin‐Lacroux, C. (2020). Anonymous
résumés: An effective preselection method? International Journal of
Selection and Assessment 28(1), 98-111.
We then talked a bit about cross-cultural differences
in content, layout and language use in CVs. One study, summarised
by Veronika, compares German and Italian CVs:
Hepp, M. (2006). The text type "curriculum vitae" in an
intercultural perspective. indications for a linguistically based
german as a second language instruction at university. Studi
Linguistici e Filologici Online, 4(1), 109-129.
http://www.humnet.unipi.it/slifo/ [in German]
Moving on to digital footprints and digital shadows,
Bernard referred to the relevant work of his colleague Stijn Baert
(who also compiled the list of studies on unconscious
bias):
Baert, S. (2018). Facebook profile picture appearance affects
recruiters’ first hiring decisions. new media & society,
20(3), 1220-1239.
To find out more about the consultancy business of our
interview guest, Anna Marie Trester, go to
https://careerlinguist.com/. Her latest book is
Trester. A. M. (2017). Bringing Linguistics to Work.
Lulu Publishing.
During the interview, Anna Marie mentions Erving
Goffman (1922-1982), a Canadian sociologist whose work became very
influential for conversation analysis and interactional
sociolinguistics.
Finally, for the analysis part of this episode, we did
an audit of each other’s internet presence. Here are some of our
profiles we scrutinise:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/erika-darics-35610448/?originalSubdomain=uk
Do come and say hi to us on any of the social media
platforms! See you again for episode 12!