Job candidates who are warm, friendly and assertive are more likely to bag the position, a new study suggests.
Amanda Feiler and Deborah Powell of the University of Guelph in Canada observed what anxious people do during an interview, and how others respond to them.
The researchers set out to establish why anxious job candidates receive lower performance ratings during an interview.
Their study is the first to use a validated interview anxiety measure with which to rate how interviewees behave, what signals they send out, and how they are perceived by those who are choosing the right person for the job.
They therefore videotaped and transcribed the mock job interviews of 125 undergraduate students from a Canadian university. Ratings were obtained from 18 interviewers who gauged the interviewees' levels of anxiety and performance.
Trained raters also assessed how the interviewees expressed their anxiety through specific mannerisms, cues and traits. This could be adjusting clothing, fidgeting or averting their gaze.
Feiler and Powell found that the speed at which someone talks is the only cue that both interviewers and interviewees rate as a sign of nervousness or not.
The fewer words per minute people speak, the more nervous they are perceived to be. Also, anxious prospective job candidates are often rated as being less assertive and exuding less interpersonal warmth.
This often leads to a rejection from interviewers.
"Overall, the results indicated that interviewees should focus less on their nervous tics and more on the broader impressions that they convey," said Feiler.
"Anxious interviewees may want to focus on how assertive and interpersonally warm they appear to interviewers," said Feiler.
The findings are published in Springer's Journal of Business and Psychology.
