The Emotionally Challenging, Open-Ended Interview    

For most job candidates, the interview experience is "an emotionally challenging endeavor". To succeed in interviews, candidates must understand the emotional labor needed to "manage their feelings" as they "create a publicly observable facial and bodily display". This is particularly true when recruiters use open-ended interviews that are not constrained to a narrow set of questions. My work in conducting research interviews illustrates several aspects of emotional labor in the interview context. Although I will talk from the perspective of the interviewer, my discussion of my own emotional labor is instructive for people entering an open-ended interview as either interviewer or interviewee because the challenges of emotional labor within the open-ended interview context apply to either interview role. Additionally, although I will draw on examples of datagathering interviews within a research context, this discussion of emotional labor applies to any interview setting--research, job interview, and so on--because the difficulties one encounters are similar across various open-ended interview situations.

Hoffmann, Elizabeth A. Business Communication Quarterly (2008). Careers>Interviewing