Publication

Social Signaling: Predicting the Outcome of Job Interviews from Vocal Tone and Prosody

March 1, 2009

Groups

Vikrant Soman, Anmol Madan

Abstract

What does it take to succeed in a job interview? Recruiters, career coaches and social psychologists alike have highlighted the role of speaking style, confidence and demeanor in the face-to-face interview process. Past work suggests that non-linguistic verbal cues play an important role in the outcomes of interviews, and that social signaling measures are quite effective in predicting behavioral outcomes in different social interactions (e.g. negotiations, dating). In this paper, we quantify the non-linguistic speaking style of engineering school students in practice job interviews, using features extracted from their vocal tone and prosody. We find that successful candidates have a characteristic speaking style and these vocal features can be used to build a predictive model of the interview outcomes, with over 85% accuracy

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