An initial face-to-face meeting improves person perceptions of interviewees across VMC

This chapter investigates the effects of initial meeting context on future video-mediated impression formation. This initial meeting either took place over a video link or face-to-face. Participants who had met the interviewee face-to-face prior to the interview rated him significantly more favourably on a number of measures (friendliness, honesty, job suitability and employability) compared to when the initial meeting took place via a video link. Initial meeting context therefore impacted on person perceptions. Video-mediated communication (VMC) is increasingly used to support interviewing at a distance. Although on the one hand this means that individuals can be interviewed for jobs without travelling to the interview destination, research suggests that the presentation of an individual over a video link may result in less favourable impression formation. The consequence of this would be that people would appear “cold” when presenting themselves over VMC