Miscommunication in Gatekeeping Encounters: Cultural Mismatch Revealed in Job Interviews

The tendency towards increasing internationalization and diversification in the present-day labor market worldwide leads to a growing demand for specialists who not only are highly qualified but also possess certain intercultural communicative competences that enable them to successfully manage various professional challenges of intercultural business communication. One of the key professional challenges is the procedure of selection during the process of admission to a particular social institution. The most common form of such a procedure is a job or employment interview, also referred to as a gatekeeping encounter. Employment interviews in a cross-cultural setting are particularly exigent due to potential cultural mismatches caused by differing cultural and linguistic background of the interlocutors. In Russia, the challenge of cross-cultural recruitment processes is still yet to be recognized given that the vast majority of young specialists do not possess any intercultural competences. This paper seeks to remedy this problem by examining relevant literature, concerning theoretical frameworks for analyzing such mismatches in intercultural selection interviews and moreover by providing an empirical examination of the effect of previous exposure to the pragmatics of such a gatekeeping encounter on the outcomes of the actual interview in a cross-cultural environment.