The COVID-19 situation has turned job interview practices upside down: while it was common to organize face-to-face job interviews, there is now a surge in technology-mediated job interviews (TMJIs). This shift to a digital medium self-evidently affects these interactions and earlier research has indeed drawn attention to the – often negative – impact of technology on interactions. For job interviews in particular, the tendency for shorter “rapport-building stages” in TMJIs is regarded as an important disadvantage. In this article, we analyze TMJIs recorded after the start of the COVID-19 crisis from a multimodal discourse analytical perspective. We specifically focus on initial sequences that are hindered by technical issues, as the limiting impact of technology is most tangible in these segments. We found that the digital medium does not necessarily prevent rapport-building efforts. Furthermore, the COVID-19 situation turned out to offer interviewers an almost self-evident point of departure for rapport-building attempts which can be viewed in the light of more encompassing facilitative actions of the recruiters. Hence, this article demonstrates that interlocutors can agentively transform technology-related deficiencies into occasions affording opportunities for potential rapport-building, especially by drawing on the shared nature of the pandemic.

中文翻译：

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COVID-19 危机期间以技术为媒介的求职面试中建立融洽关系的尝试

COVID-19 疫情彻底颠覆了求职面试的做法：虽然组织面对面的求职面试很常见，但现在以技术为媒介的求职面试 (TMJI) 却激增。这种向数字媒体的转变不言而喻地影响了这些互动，早期的研究确实引起了人们对技术对互动的通常负面影响的关注。特别是对于工作面试，TMJI 中“建立融洽关系的阶段”较短的趋势被认为是一个重要的缺点。在本文中，我们从多模态话语分析的角度分析了 COVID-19 危机开始后记录的 TMJI。我们特别关注受技术问题阻碍的初始序列，因为技术的限制影响在这些部分中最为明显。我们发现数字媒体并不一定会妨碍建立融洽关系的努力。此外，COVID-19 的情况为面试官提供了一个几乎不言而喻的建立融洽关系的出发点，这可以从招聘人员更全面的便利行动来看待。因此，本文表明，对话者可以积极地将与技术相关的缺陷转化为提供潜在建立融洽关系的机会的机会，特别是通过利用这一流行病的共同性质。