Storying the Digital Professional: How Online Screening Shifts the Primary Site and Authorship of Workers’ Career Stories
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2016
Keywords
abduction, abductive analysis, antenarrative, career, cybervetting, employability, hiring, narrative, new media, online screening, personnel selection, social media, storying
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
https://doi.org/10.1080/00909882.2016.1192287
Abstract
Employers’ use of online information increases the communicative demands and complexity of employability. For employers, gathering online information for personnel selection—a process called cybervetting—supplements or augments existing information acquisition processes. For workers, cybervetting’s extractive processes require considering potential and possible career stories employers might construct. Workers increasingly need to engage in prospective and retrospective storying to communicate and maintain employability and employment. Drawing on exemplars from employers’ reports, this essay highlights: (a) how employers report assembling and making sense of workers’ information during personnel selection; (b) the limitations of existing employability strategies; as well as (c) the increased and unequally distributed uncertainty and risk; and (d) the associated and different work expected of workers as the primary site and authorship of career stories shift.
Citation / Publisher Attribution
Journal of Applied Communication Research, v. 44, issue 3, p. 275-295.
Scholar Commons Citation
Berkelaar, B.L.; Birdsell, J.L.; and Scacco, Joshua M., "Storying the Digital Professional: How Online Screening Shifts the Primary Site and Authorship of Workers’ Career Stories" (2016). Communication Faculty Publications. 918.
https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/spe_facpub/918
