25 March 2015

Using Your Voice to Get the Dream Job

New York:  Instead of resorting to a conventional written resume, sending your prospective employer a videotape recording of your professional credentials may increase your chances of getting hired, new research shows.

A resume highlighting your professional credentials and experience could pique the interest of a prospective employer, but it is your voice that may actually help you land the job, the study said.

"In addition to communicating the contents of one's mind, like specific thoughts and beliefs, a person's speech conveys their fundamental capacity to think - the capacity for reasoning, thoughtfulness and intellect," said Nicholas Epley, professor at University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

The researchers found that when hypothetical employers and professional recruiters listened to or read job, candidate's job qualifications, they rated the candidates as more competent, thoughtful and intelligent when they heard the pitch than when they read it -- even when the words used were exactly the same.

As a result, they liked the candidate more and were more interested in hiring them.

"When conveying intelligence, it is important for one's voice to be heard -literally, Epley said.

In a series of experiments, the researchers asked a group of MBA students to develop a short pitch for the job candidates to the company for which they would most like to work. They created written pitches and spoken pitches (videotaped).

Evaluators who heard the pitch reported liking the candidate more and were significantly more likely to hire that person.

Even professional recruiters were more likely to hire the candidates whose pitches they could hear than those whose pitches they read.

The study is forthcoming in The Journal of Psychological Science.

10 million newspaper pages are now fully searchable

Just a month after hitting the 9.5 million page milestone, we’re very pleased to announce that there are now 10 million historic newspaper pages available at The British Newspaper Archive.

The website launched with 4 million pages in November 2011, which means there’s now 150% more to explore. If you’ve not searched the collection for a while, it’s definitely time to try again.

Thousands of pages are digitised every week and we’ve added some fantastic content in the last few months. Here are just some of our highlights – please do tell us yours in the comments section below.

Copies of the Daily Mirror and Sunday Mirror

Did you know that you can search the Daily Mirror and Sunday Mirror from 1914-1918 at The British Newspaper Archive? The national newspapers provide fascinating daily news, photographs and illustrations from the First World War.

58 new Irish newspapers

We’ve been working hard on expanding our collection of newspapers from the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland in the last few months. At launch, seven Irish newspaper titles were available, but now you can search a total of 65.

Newspapers from World War Two

You can now search more than 350,000 pages from 1939-1945 at The British Newspaper Archive. 60 newspaper titles are already online, including the Aberdeen Weekly Journal, Lancashire Evening Post and Kent & Sussex Courier.