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Smiling for Effect? Smiling as a Strategic Tool in Recruiters’ Impression Management in Belgian Job Interviews

Year: 2025

Type: article

Abstract: This article examines how recruiters navigate competing interactional workplace norms in job interviews. We focus in particular on smiling in recruiters’ impression management because it is situated at the nexus of the choice between more traditional and modern interactional norms for recruitment. We use multimodal discourse analysis to study a dataset of video-recordings of thirteen authentic job interviews, which we complemented with video-stimulated (VS)-interviews with all the recruiters. After qualitatively analyzing recruiters’ smiling behavior during the job interviews, we critically teased out how they reflected on their own behavior in the VS-interviews. Our findings reveal the complex nature of the indexical meanings of smiles and highlight the potential conflicts between different norms reported by recruiters in their impression management practices. Our study calls for a critical reconsideration of how smiling is approached in impression management research and further questions how recruiters strategically employ relational elements, like smiling, for instrumental purposes.

Source: International Journal of Business Communication

DOI: 10.1177/23294884251359243

Authors: Melina De Dijn, Dorien Van De Mieroop, Mike Huiskes

Institutions: KU Leuven, University of Groningen

Language: English

Topic: Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies

Subfield: Language and Linguistics

Field: Arts and Humanities

Domain: Social Sciences

Open Access status: green

Funder: KU Leuven

Award: G6714297448