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

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.