Francesca Nannetti

Progetto di ricerca
Exploring Graduate Recruitment Practices through Job Advertisements and Curricula Vitae: a Corpus Approach to HRM Research

This PhD thesis emerges from the idea of analysing digital textual data – which are now more abundant than ever – relevant to scientific concerns pertaining to the field of Human Resource Management. In particular, linguistic and non-linguistic data belonging to the job-search communicative context are collected in the form of corpora. The corpus analysed in the first chapter comprises 8,096 Curricula Vitae from students who received a certified title at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia during the 2022/2023 academic year, collected from the AlmaLaurea database. The primary contribution of this study is to shed light on how candidates actually decide to narrate themselves through their CVs, addressing the representation of competencies both as quantitative and scaled indicators and as discourse in free-text sections.
The second chapter explores a corpus of 1,859 job advertisements collected over a one-year period, from October 2023 to October 2024, from the AlmaLaurea job offers notice board, which is available to students and recent graduates of Italian universities. Investigating how organisations approach the organisational practice of job advertising to recent graduates serves to unveil the self-image that organisations deem appropriate to convey. Simultaneously, this also sheds light on the image that organisations aspire to project regarding the candidates they seek to recruit.

Given the coherence and conceptual comparability of the two corpora, which both pertain to the AlmaLaurea suite of tools, the third chapter aims to analyse the linguistic construction of a real-life dynamic: the interaction between recent graduates who use CVs to enter the world of work, and companies seeking recently graduated young talent through job advertisements. Implications can be drawn with respect to the use of certain tools and to the value that specific communication channels have assumed nowadays; insights from this study could be useful to inform both organizations and candidates, as well as universities that provide placement services..

Pubblicazioni

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