As I’ve said before, the questions you ask the interviewer are just as important as the answers you give to the questions they ask you.  Asking great questions is just another way that you can set yourself apart from other candidates who may exactly equal on skills and education required for the job. Here are 5 examples of good questions to ask on your next job interview. How has the troubled economy effected your business? What kind of challenges is the organization facing right now (particularly important if you are interviewing for a management position)? What do you think it takes for a person to be very successful in this role? Who is the longest tenured employee in the organization and how long have they been here? How would you... [Read more]

I had my long-anticipated job interview this morning and although I feel very confident in my “performance”,  some of the comments from the interviewers were quite troubling. Sometimes we go into interviews so eager for an offer that we don’t pay close attention to the clues that the interviewers give about the kind of job we might be getting ourselves into.  Here are 4 statements that you never want to hear in a job interview.  Unfortunately, I heard all 4 of them today… We’ve really had trouble keeping this position filled over the past 5 years. This department has one of the highest turnover rates in the organization. The physicians in this department are extremely involved in the day-to-day operations... [Read more]

I’ve only fired two people in my short career as a manager but both times I was baffled at how shocked and caught off-guard the people were to learn they were being terminated.  In one case the employee had falsified employment documents (that’s illegal!) and in the other case, the employee had been counseled face-to-face about 5 times during their probationary period that if the performance problems did not improve, termination would result.  In almost all cases where an employee is terminated, the signs of an impending termination were there, they were just ignored.  I ran across this awesome article, “5 Signs You’re About To Be Fired”,  that was published in U.S. News.  As a novice manager, it was nice... [Read more]

Tonight was the first Chicago Bulls pre season game.  You may remember months ago I wrote about how Vinny Del Negro convinced the Bulls leadership to give him the job of new head coach, even though had has never had a coaching job in his life.  Nothing, not even college basketball!  Now that the media has gotten their hands on Vinny and we’ve been able to take a peak at the Bulls’ practices, I understand better how he got the job.  He portrayed himself as a change agent.  When Vinny interviewed for head coach, the Bulls was a team in turmoil.  They’d just come off a season that shocked and disappointed fans and sports analysts.  The team stopped responding to their then coach Scott Skiles then he abandoned them (or... [Read more]

These days, many interviews are set up as a series of meetings with several different people from the organization so that you have several hours of interviews all on the same day. The next most important thing to answering the questions you’re asked in a magnificant way is asking great questions of your interviewer.  And one very important thing you should do to prepare to ask great questions is tailoring your questions to the individuals you’ll be interviewing with so that they are relevant to that particular person in that particular role.  Be sure to ask for your itentirary as soon as the interview is scheduled and if the titles of the interviewers are not listed, make sure to ask the HR recruiter to provide that information.  Once... [Read more]