5. Don’t Turn The Weakness Question Into A Positive

To put it bluntly, interviewers are not idiots. So when they ask you about a weakness and you say you work too hard or you are too much of a perfectionist, chances are they are more apt to roll their eyes than be blown away. Instead, be honest and come up with a weakness that can be improved on and won’t ruin your chances of getting a job.

For instance, if you are interviewing for a project management position, it wouldn’t be wise to say you have poor organizational skills, but it’s ok to say you want to learn more shortcuts in Excel. “Talk about the skills you don’t have that will add value, but aren’t required for the job,” says Pile.

This article focuses on the methodological issues arising from interviewing elites, with an emphasis on gaining access, acquiring trust, and establishing rapport. I argue the central importance of preinterview preparation, which is essential to enhance the researcher’s knowledgeability. The success of interviewing elites hinges on the researcher’s knowledgeability of the interviewee’s life history and background. It enhances the researcher’s positionality and decreases the status imbalance between researcher and researched. The researcher’s positionality is dynamic; it shifts over the course of research. Moreover, positionality is not solely determined externally in the context of an insider/outsider dichotomy but is on a continuum that can be proactively influenced by the researcher. These issues are discussed with reference to recent research on postsocialist transition in Estonia, which involved interviews with political and economic elites. These experiences will be of interest to social scientists working on elites because it focuses on meeting the challenges of interviewing elites from establishing contact through to postinterview follow-up.

You need a top-notch team to do your best work--but you need to hire them first. Here's half a dozen common ways managers shoot themselves in the human-resources foot.

RT @sbtourist: How to build a great engineering culture: /via @systems_we_make

For example, telling me you increased sales by 300% isn’t that helpful. Telling me how you learned to handle customer objections around price could prove to be very useful.

An interesting look at some real word heuristics in use by SeatGeek to
find the 10% of pursuable candidates during a job search.