New Booth Study Finds Employers Prefer to Hear Interviewee’s Voice

According to a new study by Booth School of Business professor Nicholas Epley and Ph.D. candidate Juliana Schroeder found that when employers and recruiters listened to a job candidates qualifications from their own mouth as opposed to reading them, the candidates were rated as more competent, thoughtful and intelligent, even when the words used were exactly the same. So it’s your voice that may actually help you land the job of your dreams job.

“The Sound of Intellect: Speech Reveals a Thoughtful Mind, Increasing a Job Candidate’s Appeal,” will be published in an upcoming issue of The Journal of Psychological Science, the highest ranked psychology journal.

To reach this conclusion, a group of Chicago Booth MBA job candidates  developed a short pitch to the company that they would like to work for, including both written pitches and spoken pitches that were videotaped. Candidate evaluators who heard the pitch rated the candidate as more intelligent, thoughtful and competent than the evaluators who only read a transcript of the pitch; the evaluators who watched the video pitch did not rate any differently than those who heard the pitch. In another experiment, evaluators who listened to trained actors reading job candidates’ written pitches out loud believed those candidates were more intelligent and wanted to hire them more than the evaluators who read candidates’ own written pitches.

“When conveying intelligence, it’s important for one’s voice to be heard — literally,” Epley said.

regions: Chicago

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