Evaluative Lexis and Employer Branding in Job Ads on LinkedIn

The study presented in the Chapter focuses on job advertisements posted on LinkedIn, a professionally oriented Social Networking Site (SNS). In spite of their apparent similarity to announcements posted on other recruitment platforms or in newspapers, job advertisements published on LinkedIn have been shown to be communicatively more complex and take full advantage of the options available in the online environment, displaying various additional features that contribute to setting them within the context of the SNS, i.e. of a virtual community of practice. This study discusses the use of evaluative language, a feature that is especially prominent today, and has its starting point in the analysis of a corpus of job advertisements published on this SNS. At a time when promotional messages play a crucial role in corporate communication, the migration of this genre to the web has freed it from constraints in terms of text length (number of words and characters) that traditionally applied to ads published in newspapers and has given ample scope for the components that go beyond the basic recruiting message and largely consist of evaluative language. In particular, the study focuses on positively charged lexis, identifying recurrent patterns in its use, and maps its quantitative distribution with regard to the main actors involved. The analysis demonstrates that recurrent recourse to positively charged language is not only a way to realise employer branding strategies (as some scholars have argued), but also – and more prominently – to refer to the ideal candidate and to the position being offered, sometimes contributing to setting very high, even seemingly unrealistic, requirements for the potential candidate. At the same time the study contributes to the conceptualization of recourse to evaluation on business oriented SNSs.