English in the Russian-based recruitment discourse

Russian Journal of Linguistics. 2020. No. 24(3). P. 669–686.

Gritsenko E., Alikina A.

The paper addresses the use of English in the Russian-based recruitment discourse. Language is viewed through the prism of the sociolinguistics of globalization and understood as a set of mobile trans-locally operative resources used to achieve specific goals of communication. The corpus for analysis includes job ads and résumés posted on the recruitment platforms HeadHunter and Super.Job, videotaped conversations of job seekers with recruiters and employers, and ethnographic interviews with recruitment professionals. We used discourse analysis, ethnographic methods, and quantitative measuring to analyze the data. The study consists of two stages. During the first stage, we found out that English can be used as the main language of recruitment or in the form of “insertions” in the Russian-based texts to demonstrate professionalism, position the company, and “filter” the candidates. The second stage revealed that the all-English segment of the Russian recruitment discourse has narrowed, while the use of English in “truncated” forms has increased. This dynamic is caused by the expansion of the digital segment of the Russian job market (social media, Internet channels), where English-mediated technologies are the main instrument of interaction with clients. It results in further hybridization and boosts translingualism in work-related settings. English, with its tendency to informal personified communication patterns, also affects the communicative conventions of the Russian-based recruitment discourse. The study demonstrates the growing role of English as an agent of global professional discourses and an intermediary between people and technologies.

Keywords: глобализация английского языка, bilingualism, билингвизм, globalization of English language, indexicality, межъязыковая гибридизация, индексальность, language hybridization, Expanding Circle, recruitment discourse, Расширяющийся круг, дискурс трудоустройства