Research on Influence of Interviewee's Facial Expression on Interviewer's Impression during Online Interview.

Abstract

This research focused on the influence of the interviewee's facial expressions on the interviewer's impressions during an online interview and aimed to provide useful information about online interviews for the students through an experiment. In the experiment, eight versions of video of the online interview consisting of two kinds of contents of the interview with two kinds of facial expressions performed by both male and female students were prepared. The two kinds of facial expressions are smiling and being stonefaced. One of two kinds of contents is “Tell me about yourself”, and “Tell me your major strengths and weaknesses”, and the other is “Tell me what you poured your energy into when you were a student”, and “Tell me what challenges you are looking for after joining the company”. 42 participants were required to watch four versions of video consisting of two kinds of the contents, by both of male and female, and with either smiling or being stone-faced and estimate the impression to the interviewee after watching each video.

The results of the experiments revealed that the interviewee's smiling faces made the interviewer's impressions better than being stone-faced, and that the interviewee's facial expressions influenced the interviewer's impressions. The results also revealed that the change of the facial expressions during the interview also influenced the impressions, and that the presence or absence of the change of the facial expressions during the interview influenced the impressions even if the interviewee's final facial expression is the same.