Examining Linguistic Content And Skill Impression Structure For Job Interview Analytics In Hospitality

First impressions are critical to professional interactions especially in the context of employment interviews. This work investigates connections between linguistic content and first impressions in job interviews and the structure of ten soft skills and overall impressions. Towards this, we transcribe 169 role-played job interviews conducted at a hospitality school and analyze the linguistic content using off-the-shelf software. To understand the structure of the soft skill impressions, we conduct a principal component analysis. We then develop methods to automatically infer impressions using verbal and nonverbal features and their combination. Results indicate low predictive power of verbal cues for overall impression (R-2 = 0.11). Combined verbal and nonverbal cues explain up to 34% of variance, a marginal improvement over R-2 = 0.32 using only nonverbal cues. The use of principal components reveals a major component associated to overall positive and negative impressions that when used as labels for supervised learning results in a regression performance of R-2 = 0.41.