A Study Of Consensus Analysis In Recruiter And Applicant Impression Management Tactics

Impression Management (IM) is a process in which a person tries to affect others' impression. Everyone hopes to be regarded as an optimistic person and expects to find a way of making a good impression on others. In our daily life or in studying or working we always use IM. The preview study on IM mainly focused on the aspects of interior organizations and the communications among people. These years, the attention people has increasingly drawn to talent assessment and human resource,and then many scholars place their research on recruitment situations, IM now has become an important research variable. Following this tendency, based on recruitment situation, this paper looks into the common IM tactics under the interactive pattern of the applicants and recruiters.This paper contains two parts:The first part is the summary stage. It reviewed the origin of the conception of IM and its developing process, introduced the common IM tactics, and gave a commentary on oversea and domestic research.The second part is the empirical study stage. On the basis of the summary stage, this paper adopted questionnaire survey and interviewing method .By changing the variables in sex, major, academic qualifications, the lever of self-monitoring, the working life, the work places and etc, we can look into the different attitude to IM tactics between the applicants and recruiters.With the methods of interview and questionnaire we get a two-dimensional IM model: Self-focus or Other-focus patterns; positive or negative patterns. Through investigation and questionnaires we find some interesting results:(1)From the side of the applicants, we find that higher self-monitoring applicants are more likely to use IM tactics; and it has clearly difference in ingratiation between male and female applicants; and the applicants who have higher academic credentials will more frequently use IM tactics; and the arts applicants use IM tactics more frequently than the science applicants; and the applicants who have working experience are better at using the IM tactics than the students that have no working experience.(2)From the side of the recruiters, we find that comparing with the female recruiters, male recruiters will give a higher rating to the applicants if he or she uses self-promotion or ingratiation tactics; and comparing with the higher academic qualification recruiters,the lower academic qualification recruiters will more likely show empathy to the applicants who use defensive IM tactics; and there is a clearly different rating between the recruiters working 1-2 years and 3-5years; and the recruiters from different work place show different rating in IM tactics. Moreover, by comparing the difference between applicants and recruiters, we know that the applicants are more likely to use defensive IM tactics while the recruiters more likely support the assertive IM tactics.This thesis contributes much to place the impression management tactics on the interview situation. It benefits the applicants and recruiters and helps them to understand each other and get a win-win result. I also hope that this study may give wise advice and open a new way in our native research on IM tactics study, especially in talent assessment field.