Anxious, slow talkers often rejected for job

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Toronto: You must exude warmth and be assertive during a job interview if you want to make a good impression, suggests a study.

People who are anxious going into an interview often do not get hired, found the researchers.

The study, published in Springer's Journal of Business and Psychology, found that organisations often reject potential candidates with interview jitters who are otherwise quite capable of doing the job.

Amanda Feiler and Deborah Powell from the University of Guelph, Canada, set out to establish why anxious job candidates receive lower performance ratings during an interview.

They 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," Feiler added.