Training on the Job: Behavioral Analysis of Job Interviews in Hospitality

First impressions play a critical role in the hospitality industry and have been shown to be closely linked to the behavior of the person being judged. In this work, we implemented a behavioral training framework for hospitality students with the goal of improving the impressions that other people make about them. We outline the challenges associated with designing such a framework and embedding it in the everyday practice of a real hospitality school. We collected a dataset of 169 laboratory sessions where two role-plays were conducted, job interviews and reception desk scenarios, for a total of 338 interactions. For job interviews, we evaluated the relationship between automatically extracted nonverbal cues and various perceived social variables in a correlation analysis. Furthermore, our system automatically predicted first impressions from job interviews in a regression task, and was able to explain up to 32% of the variance, thus extending the results in existing literature, and showing gender differences, corroborating previous findings in psychology. This work constitutes a step towards applying social sensing technologies to the real world by designing and implementing a living lab for students of an international hospitality management school.