Professional talk on cybervetting: Accounting for a contested practise

Abstract

Even though recruiters’ practise of searching for information online during recruitment and selection has been a contested practise, owing to the risk of discrimination and privacy intrusions as well as poor evidence for its ability to predict work performance, it is used in recruitment. In this article, our aim is to understand how ‘professional talk’ is used as a discursive resource to legitimize contested practises such as the practise of cybervetting by recruiters. The study is based on interviews with 37 recruiters in Sweden, all of whom had experience of cybervetting jobseekers. We found that professional talk was linked to objectivity and being unemotional, having knowledge about recruitment methods and the ability to distinguish between relevant and irrelevant information. In relation to the theory on professional talk, our study contributes with empirical evidence for the normative function of professional talk. Using cybervetting, as a case of legitimizing controversial practises, we provide a theoretical contribution to the theory on professional talk by illustrating how professional talk not only fills a disciplinary function by restraining a practise but also by enabling, legitimizing and providing discursive frames for how it can be performed.