Interactionally negotiating power in ‘War for Talent’ job interviews

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Job interviews (JIs) are often described in the literature as asymmetrical gatekeeping encounters. This power imbalance is expected to be visible, for instance, in how the differential distribution of discursive resources favors the interviewer, whose interactional rights surpass those of the candidate. However, this view on job interviews has been criticized for not sufficiently taking into account the agency of the participants, and in this article, we develop this line of research further by also integrating context as a crucial factor for a correct understanding of power. There have been important changes in the recruitment context recently – which, especially in some sectors, has moved to a ‘War for Talent’ (WarFT) – and we argue that this may unsettle the job interview’s ‘traditional’ power dynamic and even result, sometimes, in ‘reversed gatekeeping’. We scrutinize the traces of this trend by adopting a micro-oriented, multimodal discourse analytical method to study the interactional processes typically linked to power in twelve WarFT job interviews. We argue that in this WarFT context interactional power may indeed shift as a result of the agentive choices of the JI participants and may at times even result in a reversal of this interactional power dynamic. This shows the importance of the interface between agency and context in understanding how power is negotiated in interaction.