Merry Christmas!

Linus says it best:

Tip: Handling Oddball Interview Questions

On the Yahoo HotJobs career advice page, Robert McCauley presents some ideas about how to handle those… er… interesting interview questions.

Oddball Interview Questions
How to Handle Random or Bizarre Queries
Robert McCauley, Robert Half International

“If you could be any animal, what would it be?” Hiring managers are increasingly posing such off-the-wall queries during job interviews in an effort to gauge a prospective employee’s fit with the company’s corporate culture.

I’ve worked with hiring managers who relied on questions like these. One would ask every candidate, “How would you figure out the weight of an airplane without using a scale.” Matt was looking for some mathematical way the weight could be calculated. My favorite answer came from a marketing type: “I’m sure a big company like that would have a web page. I’d just go to their web page and look up the weight.”

Man fired for posting ‘Dilbert’ comparing boss to drunken lemur

A story in the Des Moines Register points out the dangers for those who believe they have an unrestricted right of free speech in the workplace (and the dangers of working for people without a sense of humor.)

Bosses fire worker who put up ‘Dilbert’ comic

A Fort Madison man who posted a “Dilbert” comic strip on an office bulletin board has lost his job for implying his bosses were a bunch of “drunken lemurs.”

On Oct. 27, shortly after company officials announced that the casino would be closing and 170 workers could be laid off, Steward posted a “Dilbert” comic strip on an office bulletin board.

Steward said he was fired three days after posting the comic, with his boss telling him he wasn’t a team player. The casino then challenged Steward’s claim for unemployment benefits, but Administrative Law Judge Lynette Donner sided with Steward.

Donner ruled that the posting of the comic strip represented “a good-faith error in judgment,” not intentional misbehavior.

For the full story, click the link above, and this link to a follow-up Register story.

For the complete view, check out the great commentary from Dilbert man himself, Scott Adams, on his DilbertBlog. Adams makes the following observation:

If you intend to mock your boss with Dilbert comics, the trick is in knowing which comics to pick. Apparently there is a fine line between posting a comic that criticizes a particular policy decision, versus a comic that calls your boss an inebriated prosimian. (Thank you, Wikipedia.)

In order to get his unemployment benefits, the perpetrator had to convince a judge that he was merely stupid, not intentionally misbehaving. He succeeded, but it’s not the sort of victory he should feel good about, as in “Yay! The judge agrees I’m an idiot! It’s going to be in the newspaper and all over the Internet!”

The moral of this story is that if you plan to circulate a Dilbert comic calling your boss a drunken lemur, the best way is to use your boss’s unattended computer to e-mail it to the entire company.

How Not to Get a Job at Scriptorium Publishing

Sarah at Palimpsest blogs about the experience of sifting through resumes. Palimpsest is the blog for Scriptorium Publishing, a technical publishing company based in Research Triangle Park, NC. Having received the usual mess, Sarah’s not enjoying the responses:

Cover letter for the wrong position. Of the resumes that did arrived with cover letters, about one third (!!!!) referenced a position at a different company. Several letters arrived looking something like this:

I am very interested in the position of [Not Our Position Name], especially since I am so interested in the [Not Us] industry. As you can see from my resume, I am very detail-oriented.

It’s not good when your resume makes me snort.

Yep. Snorting is not good.

See the whole thing at How Not to Get a Job at Scriptorium Publishing

NotJobs: 150 Funniest Resume Mistakes Ever

Over on the JobMob page, they’re tracking the funniest resume mistakes ever. Here are my favorites from their list.

• Under “job related skills” – for a web designer – “can function without additional oxygen at 24,000 feet”.
• Qualifications: “I have guts, drive, ambition and heart, which is probably more than a lot of the drones that you have working for you.”
• A resume listed a skill as “being bi-lingual in three languages” (Ask Annie’s)
• Background: “28 dog years of experience in sales (four human).” (Resumania)
• Education: “I have a bachelorette degree in computers.”
• Objective: “I need money because I have bills to pay and I would like to have a life, go out partying, please my young wife with gifts, and have a menu entrée consisting of more than soup.”
• Reason for leaving last job: “Bounty hunting was outlawed in my state.”
• Achievements: “Nominated for prom queen”
• Objective: “To become Overlord of the Galaxy!”

Check the whole posting out for all the horrifyingly true details.

Tips: 3 interview questions you must answer

Shawn Graham is the author of a new job search book titled, “COURTING YOUR CAREER, Match Yourself with the Perfect Job”. I haven’t read it, but I’ve followed Shawn’s blog, which he connected to the book.
Shawn has some recent advice about interviewing that make me want to read his book. Here is Shawn’s wisdom – questions that must be answered in an interview:

3 interview questions you must answer

1. Why you’re interested in their company

2. Why you’re interested in the position

3. Why the company should hire you

Generic answers won’t cut it if you’re going to stand out from other equally-qualified candidates. In many ways, companies are just like people. They want to feel special, like they’re “the one” for you. They want to know that you’re genuinely interested in joining their team.

If you’re the interviewer, you must know the answers to these questions. If you’re the candidate, make sure you’ve planned to answer these. Make sure you visit his site for all the points about these three questions.

Tip: What’s the Position Worth?

Johanna Rothman makes a great point on the Hiring Technical People blog:

Companies don’t pay people because they are warm-hearted. They pay employees to provide value. The more value, the more pay. (We hope. Sometimes, that’s the more expected value, the more pay.) If you’re a candidate, define your value. If you’re a hiring manager define the value you want to receive. Now you’ll have a much better understanding of what you should pay. And, you’ll know what the decision is worth.

She’s on to something, but I would phrase it slightly differently:

Companies don’t pay people because they are warm-hearted. They pay employees to solve a business problem.

Knowledge is the key here.

How Not to Get a Job in Atlanta

A blogger named “jobseeker411″ at staffing service FutureStaff makes my point, again and again:

Atlanta Job Seekers….. How not to get a job!

You’ll hear people telling you to prepare for an interview. Baloney! You’re not getting paid for it! Don’t waste your time researching the company; it’s their job to educate you. Don’t bring your resume; if Human Resources are doing their job, they’ll have it out, waiting on you to get there. Don’t waste your time by writing down directions either, you can always call on the way and have the manager talk you through traffic.

Check it out for the rest of the suggestions. They also talk about the flip side.

What Do I Do? Depends on What Week It Is

Sean Aiken has an interesting take on his quest to find new work. After getting a business degree, he still didn’t know what he wanted to do, so he took a typical GenY approach, and made a media event of his career search.

What Do I Do? Depends on What Week It Is

When Sean Aiken was a boy, he thought he might like to be a professional basketball player once he grew up. Now he is 25, and he is decidedly less certain.

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In that way he is like so many of his millennial generation — new workers wavering on the threshold of real life, determined to get it right, they say, and fearful that they might get it wrong.

“My father looked at me,” Mr. Aiken recalled, “and said, ‘I’ve been around 60 years and I’ve yet to find something I’m passionate about except your mother.’” Sobered by that thought, Mr. Aiken hatched his plan to work at 52 jobs in a year and to chronicle the search on a Web site, oneweekjob.com. He would take no salary for the work, but would encourage his “employers” to make a donation to charity. He spread the word through a mass e-mail message to friends and family and eventually through word of Web.

This is an interesting take, but not one that all of us could try. (For one – how many of us could afford to take a whole year off to find ourselves or our future?) I also wonder what this says about the status of the career center at Mr. Aiken’s alma mater. Still, Aiken is finding out some things about work in the real world.

Someone should give him a shot at being a recruiter for a week.

Today’s the Day: GO NAVY!

“There is no bowl game at stake here. There is no coalition poll, no number one ranking. No Heisman Trophy is at stake here. This is bigger than all that.”

– Brent Musburger,
as quoted in “A Civil War” by John Feinstein

Today is the Army-Navy game, this year in Baltimore. In memory of Admiral Tom B. Hill, USNA grad and my maternal great-uncle:

GO NAVY!

Update 1:23PM MST: Great Game, Navy! 38-3, and six in a row.