Francesca Nannetti

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

This PhD thesis is motivated by the aim of analysing digital textual data of direct relevance to Human Resource Management research. The specific communicative context under examination is job searching discourse, with particular emphasis on graduate recruitment practices.  The selected digital textual objects, namely Curricula Vitae of recent graduates and job advertisements specifically aimed at them, were collected and organised into corpora that combine textual content with contextual information.
The first Chapter analyses a corpus of Curricula Vitae from students who obtained 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 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 recent graduates of Italian universities. Investigating how companies approach the organisational practice of job advertising to recent graduates serves to unveil the self-image that companies 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 investigate 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 can inform both organisations and candidates, as well as universities that provide placement services.

Employing a Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (CADS) methodology informed by and informing different theoretical frameworks – reflecting the needs of Chapters 1-3 – each Chapter takes as its main point of reference the social system that language contributes to construct, with frequent (and non-frequent) patterns in language reflecting patterns in social attitudes, values, and behaviour. As data management practices inform every other aspect of transparent research, the operational processes involved in the creation of corpora and the workflow that governs these processes are thoroughly discussed. Particular attention is given to the interplay between textual content and contextual information (used as metadata) in each corpus, and on how this interaction frames both corpus design and the subsequent interpretation of findings.

Pubblicazioni

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