This master thesis is centered around the job interview and has the main purpose of examining which perspectives to draw when you combine the present structure of the interview and the interaction of participants with the somewhat different aspects of organizational coaching.
A lot of people have the experience of participating in a job interview, mostly as job seekers, but some also as managers or recruitment responsibles. Especially the internet provides a lot of how-to literature for the job seekers on how to prepare their participating in a job interview: How to behave, how to answer the questions correctly, and how to make a good impression on the job interviewers. This thesis has arisen from a concern about how the basis of assessment is created between the interview participants when they both know what to expect. Following, this thesis has arisen from the concern of the great predictability and transparency that seem to be predominant in the field.

The aim is to explore how organizational coaching and job interviews – two fields with differing logics – can benefit from one another in spite of their differences, for example in regards to the main purpose of the dialogue; in coaching the purpose is to ensure and support development and learning for the focus person and the main purpose of a job interview is to evaluate; an evaluation which is done by both candidate and interviewer, though primarily by the latter.

Prior to the thesis we had the hypothesis that there was a great amount of similarities to be found in job interviews in regards to especially structure of the interview and interaction between the participants. Based on this hypothesis, we additionally had the desire to bring new perspectives to the field, as we saw an obvious possibility for development. As we were curious as to whether the hypothesis could be confirmed or invalidated we agreed upon cooperating with a large, privately held organization. Thus, the empirical foundation for the thesis was established.

Through several analyses of our empirical data we explore partly how the interaction between the job candidate and the recruitment responsible unfolds, and which situations the interaction contains, and partly how the structure of the interview is set. We discuss options and limitations for considering the job interview as organizational coaching. Through these analyses we confirm our hypotheses and in addition to this we find elements of coaching in the way the recruitment responsibles ask questions.

We answer our main problem for the thesis through a discussion on how the perspectives of organizational coaching can contribute to the contemporary structure of the interview and the interaction of the participants.