Abstract
This paper examines the effect of voice quality on hiring decisions. Considering voice quality an important tool in an individual’s self-presentation in the job market, it may very well enhance his/her job prospects, while some voice qualities may affect employers’ judgments in a negative way. Five men and five women were recorded reading four different utterances representing answers to job interviewers’ questions in four different phonation guises: modal, breathy, creaky and pressed. 38 professional employment interviewers recorded the speakers’ hireability and personality ratings (likeability, self-confidence and trustworthiness) on 7-point semantic differential scales based on the speakers’ voice. The results revealed a significant effect of the phonation guises on the speakers’ ratings with the modal voice being superior to the cluster of non-modal voices. Interestingly, the non-modal guises were evaluated in a very similar way, except for the self-confidence category with the breathy voice getting the lowest scores on the one hand and the pressed voice correlating with high self-confidence ratings on the other.
Highlights
Efficient sharing of information is one of the most characteristic aspects of the current period; in the digital era, more and more emphasis is being put on an individual’s ability to communicate effectively and to convey messages clearly and accurately both verbally and non-verbally
Considering the contemporary job market context, required educational qualifications and professional experience certainly do not represent the only decisive factors in the recruitment and selection process (DeVito, 2016: 24). It is the overall self-presentation of applicants at job interviews that seems to play a very important role when it comes to hiring decisions
It can be stated that the voice manipulations performed by our speakers had a significant effect on the evaluation of the four characteristics, as shown by the results of a repeated measures ANOVA, with Phonation type being the independent variable within the variable Speaker: for likeability, F(3, 27) = 32.6; p < 0.001; for self-confidence, F(3, 27) = 48.0; p < 0.001; for trustworthiness, F(3, 27) = 49.2; p < 0.001; and for employability, F(3, 27) = 48.1; p < 0.001
Summary
Efficient sharing of information is one of the most characteristic aspects of the current period; in the digital era, more and more emphasis is being put on an individual’s ability to communicate effectively and to convey messages clearly and accurately both verbally and non-verbally. Considering the contemporary job market context, required educational qualifications and professional experience certainly do not represent the only decisive factors in the recruitment and selection process (DeVito, 2016: 24). It is the overall self-presentation of applicants at job interviews that seems to play a very important role when it comes to hiring decisions. There exist quite a lot of studies on human voice, investigation into voice quality and its social role has not attracted much attention until recently This question has become of great interest to the academic community, and to a wide range of professionals as well as to the media (Greer & Winters, 2015). To our best knowledge, not many researchers have examined the importance of voice quality within social interaction in the Czech context
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