Rapport-building attempts in technology-mediated job interviews during the COVID-19 crisis

Abstract The COVID-19 situation has turned job interview practices upside down: while it was common to organize face-to-face job interviews, there is now a surge in technology-mediated job interviews (TMJIs). This shift to a digital medium self-evidently affects these interactions and earlier research has indeed drawn attention to the – often negative – impact of technology on interactions. For job interviews in particular, the tendency for shorter “rapport-building stages” in TMJIs is regarded as an important disadvantage. In this article, we analyze TMJIs recorded after the start of the COVID-19 crisis from a multimodal discourse analytical perspective. We specifically focus on initial sequences that are hindered by technical issues, as the limiting impact of technology is most tangible in these segments. We found that the digital medium does not necessarily prevent rapport-building efforts. Furthermore, the COVID-19 situation turned out to offer interviewers an almost self-evident point of departure for rapport-building attempts which can be viewed in the light of more encompassing facilitative actions of the recruiters. Hence, this article demonstrates that interlocutors can agentively transform technology-related deficiencies into occasions affording opportunities for potential rapport-building, especially by drawing on the shared nature of the pandemic.