ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the linguistic penalty that the current discursive regimes of selection interviewing have produced and considers how competency frameworks require convincing stories of past work experience. In promotion and junior management selection interviews, the competencies are reworked to give explicit focus to managing people and tasks in teams, innovation and self-development, and learning from experience, particularly from failures. While candidates may have to design carefully how they introduce foreign work experience (FWE), the hard interactional work to connect it to the competences required in a convincing way has only just begun. Candidates who are aware that they have to make their experience familiar and thereby relevant will attempt to translate specific terms used in their FWE into UK equivalences. The regulation and management of foreign work experience both provides an additional penalty and serves to reinforce other linguistic penalties brought about in the interview.
