Teaching Business Communication and Employment

With the unstable economy, the Wall Street protests, and the alarmingly high unemployment rate of 9.1, the mention of job hunting is a sore subject for many Americans. People who have jobs are dreading a pink slip, while ...

"Whether you are a new middle manager or a new President-elect, the common wisdom is that you have three months to make an impact in your new role. And yet when preparing for job interviews, candidates make the mistake of believing that most questions will be about their past experience, not what they plan to do once hired.

New hires have to impress their bosses, peers, and employees in less time than it takes some of us to arrange a meeting. So if you're interviewing for a job, plan to be asked the question: "What do you hope to achieve in your first three months?"

We talk to the founder of Facebook's Analog Research Laboratory about taking initiative, carving out a niche, and building the job you want.

Have you been laid off or downsized? Perhaps you took time off of work for family reasons. Whatever the reason, you probably have an employment gap. Here's why they matter and how to deal with an employment gap.

For any newbies to social networking, it might seem unusual to use a site such as Twitter to find a job.

Five interview questions and answers from excerpted from Are You Smart Enough to Work at Google? by William Poundstone. 4.

A book has N pages, numbered the usual way, from 1 to N. The total number of digits in the page numbers is 1,095. How many pages does the book have? How many pages does the book have? A. Every page number has a digit in the units column. With N pages, that's N digits right there. All but the first 9 pages have a digit in the tens column. That's N - 9 more digits.

All but the first 99 pages have a digit in the hundreds column (accounting for N - 99 more digits). I could go on, but not many books have more than 999 pages. A book with 1,095 digits in its page numbers won't, anyway. This means that 1,095 must equal: N + (N - 9) + (N - 99). This can be simplified to: 1,095 = 3N - 108. That means that 3N = 1,203, or N = 401. That's the answer, 401 pages.

Brain teasers like the ones used for hiring by the Internet giant are spreading to other picky employers. Match your wits against puzzles that trip up even the cleverest applicants.

"If you could be any superhero, who would it be?" "What color best represents your personality?" "What animal are you?" These questions, posted by job candidates on Glassdoor.com, aren't from some wacky Silicon Valley start-up—they're asked of applicants at AT&T, Johnson & Johnson and Bank of America, respectively.

Goldman Sachs interviewers ask candidates the firm's stock price. Morgan Stanley asks interviewees to name a recent story they've read in the Financial Times—apparently, a lot can't. J.P. Morgan Chase asks the value of pi. (It's thought to be instructive to see how many digits the candidate can recite.)

Since being a math or tech whiz is irrelevant to running most businesses, some companies have redoubled their efforts to find the perfect match of candidate and corporate personality. Whole Foods interviewers have candidates describe their perfect "last meal." It's a quick way of gauging the applicant's knowledge of food and passion for it. Expedia does the same thing with travel, asking questions like "If you could go camping anywhere, where would you put your tent?"