Month: May 2014

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8 Questions You Should Ask Your Interviewer To Prove How Smart You Are

(condensed from a Business Insider article)

Q: What are some of the problems your company faces right now? And what is your department doing to solve them?

Q: What type of employee tends to succeed here? What qualities are the most important for doing well and advancing at the firm?

Q: I noticed that you teach a night class at NYU School of Continuing Education. How long have you been teaching, and what are some of the things that you’ve learned from the experience?

Q: What are your plans for combating Japanese competition in the full-size pickup market?

Q: Who would I be reporting to? Are those three people on the same team, or are they on different teams? What’s the ‘pecking order’?

Q: I read your CEO’s letter to the editor in Business Week. How did his insights about the emerging Hispanic market impact your Hispanic subsidiary? Did they end up winning a lot of new business as a result? Continue reading “8 Questions You Should Ask Your Interviewer To Prove How Smart You Are”

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If I’m In Charge Of Deciding, Then Why Aren’t I Employed?

From LinkedIn a few minutes ago:

Why am I getting so sick of the ‘salary’ stumbling block?

World’s Most Interesting Engineer at Your Company

I have been around enough now to pretty much see it all. I remember when it was the headhunter/recruiter/agent/employer/hiring manager that actually made a decision whether you were on the short, long, or any list. They knew what they were looking for.

Then came the budget cuts that ruined almost everything-including the entire hiring paradigm (I’m using that word here to impress you, as I have no idea how it applies). It seems like it happened overnight…

Job seekers now filter based on keywords, and I am bombarded by mail merge emails asking me to go to some web site and ‘register’-which means spending 30 minutes filling in database fields for them to do those keyword searches later.

“Take a look at this req, and if you are a match-or you know someone who is-go fill in this registration form…” How has this improved things for a job seeker? Now, I am expected to spend my entire day filling out forms so that someone who has no idea what I do for a living can send me job alerts for roles that are anything but what I do-simply because there was a keyword match.

Worst of all, Continue reading “If I’m In Charge Of Deciding, Then Why Aren’t I Employed?”