A GENRE-BASED ANALYSIS OF FACULTY RECRUITMENT ADVERTISEMENTS IN SELECTED PUBLIC SECTOR UNIVERSITIES OF PAKISTAN

Abstract

This study is the first systematic genre analysis of job advertisements in Pakistani universities. It is based on Bhatia’s (1993) seven-step analytical framework and is applied to a corpus of five advertisements taken from five public-sector HEC-regulated universities, including Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad (QAU), University of Engineering and Technology Lahore (UET), Bahauddin Zakariya University Multan (BZU), University of Agriculture Faisalabad (UAF), and Government College University Faisalabad (GCUF). The study employs a qualitative research design to examine the rhetorical move structure and communicative purposes of these institutionally produced recruitment texts. The analysis identified eleven different rhetorical moves, of which nine were obligatory across the five corpus texts. Our findings show that the genre simultaneously functions as an informational, regulatory, procedural, promotional, and ideological communicative device, with individual moves encoding institutional authority, disciplining prospective applicants via eligibility discourse, and reproducing asymmetrical power relations between recruiting institutions and academic labor markets. The study contributes to the scholarship of genre analysis in Pakistani professional contexts and provides practical implications for university administrators, prospective applicants, policymakers at HEC, and practitioners of English for Professional Purposes (EPP).