An Empirical Study Of The Effect Of Body Language On Employment Interviews

Human resources are the core competitiveness of enterprises. Employment interview is the first and most important points of it, so that the interview is talent into the company’s key "gate". Body language as a kind of non-verbal physical sign, can play a role of language communication in interpersonal communication. Therefore, it is often used as an impression management strategy to be applied in interview.The purpose of this study is to verify the role of body language on employment interviews. In this study, sales job interview as an example,establishes a evaluation index system of the sales job interview(This evaluation index system has 5 dimensions, respectively for knowledge, skills, motives, traits and self-image). The study designs a experiment which is a 3×3complete within-subject design to test the hypothesis that different body language on the interview results have different effects. 9 videotapes of a male job applicant displaying various intensities of body language( no body language, the single fixed body language and multi body language) and answering various dimensional problems( dimension of motives, dimension of traits and dimension of self-image) are shown to and rated by 18 subjects as a recruiter. The results showed that the order of the interview scores with different body language : the single fixed body language > multi body language > no body language, which in motives dimension multi body language scores are the highest, and in trait dimension and self-image dimension the single fixed body language are the highest one.Accordingly, not the more body language, the better. Using appropriate body language needs concrete analysis of concrete problems. In the actual interview, on the one hand, the applicant can use body language to doing impression management. On the other hand, the employers can also be consciously the body language of applicants were observed to judge their true ability.