Tuesday, August 11, 2020

That dreaded Job Interview....

Turning up naked at an interview is NOT
recommended!

Noticed a couple of fellow bloggers on the prowl for that corner office and stratospheric remuneration (Salary/ Pay - for the workers; Remuneration - for the executives).

Recall coming across some pretty good material a long time ago albeit from the interviewer's point of view. Theses are the questions designed to put you off, make you sweat and shake.

Basically, the objective of the interview is to see if you can:
  1. Do the job
  2. Want to do the job
  3. Get on with the boss and his crones
So when you're in that room, don't panic. Here's some pointers....


Appearance

Don't scream "pervert" if the guy's staring at you. Just trying to decide if that nose pin matches with the outfit (get rid of those studs and hide the tats).


Work Experience. They will ask some irrelevant questions, things like:
  1. Things you liked best about your last job
  2. Things you liked less
  3. What were your accomplishments and how did you achieve them
  4. What did you learn from job
  5. What were the difficult problems you faced and how did you handled them
  6. Were there opportunities for promotion and advancement (why weren't YOU promoted?)
  7. Ways you found most effective with people
  8. Type of challenges you faced and how did you meet them
  9. What's the reason(s) for changing job
  10. Any frustration’s on the job and how did you go about resolving them
  11. What's your preferred job environment
  12. What are you looking for in a job and where do you see yourself in X years (your career ambitions)

Education
  1. Subjects you liked best (no point going for a book-keeping job and saying you hate maths)
  2. Those liked less and why
  3. What were your reactions to teachers(if you hated maths, you'll be asked if your maths teacher was bad).
  4. What were your grades and how much effort did you put in (are you a quick learner or a little slow?)
  5. Why did you chose the college that you did
  6. How did you chose your major
  7. What were the toughest courses
  8. What were your major achievements and how you managed it (sitting at the pub).
  9. What were your extracurricular activities (careful here!)
  10. Relate your education with your career ambitions (make sure it's consistent with 12 above)
  11. Satisfaction with your education
  12. Any specialised on-the-job training (Save the guy money since your last boss' trained you)
  13. Recent courses attended (ditto)
  14. Future educational plans (don't say none!)

Attendance (just making sure you're not a lazy b*stard)
  1. What do you do in your spare time (boozing is not the right answer).
  2. What are your hobbies and interests
  3. Do you get involved in the community
  4. What have you learned from these activities
  5. What activities would you like to be involved in but currently aren't
and the sneaky one...

Given these commitments, what's your availability for the specific job requirements such as:
  • travel
  • relocation
  • overtime
  • weekend work
  • evening assignments

Attitude/ Initiative
Positive
  1. What contributions have you made to your current job/ school
  2. Do you have any specific talents or abilities
  3. How was your recent performance review (good stuff)
  4. What are your best qualities as seen by others
  5. What are your assets in working with others
  6. What are your interests
Negative
  1. Where do you need to improvement
  2. What are your weaknesses
  3. Qualities wish to develop further
  4. What advice have you received from others
  5. Any areas needing improvement in working with others
  6. What further training or experience do you think you need
  7. Recent performance review (bad stuff)
What is your present or last salary
(don't lie here, unless the Company's hit the wall and the truth will never be known)

... and Luck! You'll need plenty of it.

Defining Success - Subroto Bagchi

Welcome Address by Subroto Bagchi, Chief Operating Officer, MindTree Consulting on July 2, 2004 to the Class of 2004 at the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore on "Defining Success".

"I was the last child of a small-time government servant, in a family of five brothers. My earliest memory of my father is as that of a District Employment Officer in Koraput, Orissa. It was and remains as back of beyond as you can imagine. There was no electricity; no primary school nearby and water did not flow out of a tap. As a result, I did not go to school until the age of eight; I was home-schooled.

My father used to get transferred every year. The family belongings fit into the back of a jeep - so the family moved from place to place and, without any trouble, my Mother would set up an establishment and get us going. Raised by a widow who had come as a refugee from the then East Bengal, she was a matriculate when she married my father.

My parents set the foundation of my life and the value system which makes me what I am today and largely defines what success means to me today.

As District Employment Officer, my father was given a jeep by the government. There was no garage in the Office, so the jeep was parked in our house. My father refused to use it to commute to the office. He told us that the jeep is an expensive resource given by the government – he reiterated to us that it was not 'his jeep' but the government's jeep. Insisting that he would use it only to tour the interiors, he would walk to his office on normal days. He also made sure that we never sat in the government jeep - we could sit in it only when it was stationary. That was our early childhood lessons in governance - a lesson that corporate managers learn the hard way, some never do.

The driver of the jeep was treated with respect due to any other member of my father's office. As small children, we were taught not to call him by his name. We had to use the suffix 'dada' whenever we were to refer to him in public or private. When I grew up to own a car and a driver by the name of Raju was appointed - I repeated the lesson to my two small daughters. They have, as a result, grown up to call Raju, 'Raju Uncle' - very different from many of their friends who refer to their family drivers as 'my driver'. When I hear that term from a school - or college-going person - I cringe. To me, the lesson was significant – you treat small people with more respect than how you treat big people. It is more important to respect your subordinates than your superiors.

Our day used to start with the family huddling around my Mother's chulha - an earthen fire place she would build at each place of posting where she would cook for the family. There was no gas, nor electrical stoves. The morning routine started with tea. As the brew was served, Father would ask us to read aloud the editorial page of The Statesman's 'muffosil' edition - delivered one day late. We did not understand much of what we were reading. But the ritual was meant for us to know that the world was larger than Koraput district and the English I speak today, despite having studied in an Oriya medium school, has to do with that routine. After reading the newspaper aloud, we were told to fold it neatly. Father taught us a simple lesson. He used to say, "You should leave your newspaper and your toilet, the way you expect to find it". That lesson was about showing consideration to others. Business begins and ends with that simple precept.

Being small children, we were always enamored with advertisements in the newspaper for transistor radios - we did not have one. We saw other people having radios in their homes and each time there was an advertisement of Philips, Murphy or Bush radios, we would ask Father when we could get one. Each time, my Father would reply that we did not need one because he already had five radios - alluding to his five sons. We also did not have a house of our own and would occasionally ask Father as to when, like others, we would live in our own house. He would give a similar reply, "We do not need a house of our own. I already own five houses". His replies did not gladden our hearts in that instant. Nonetheless, we learnt that it is important not to measure personal success and sense of well being through material possessions.

Government houses seldom came with fences. Mother and I collected twigs and built a small fence. After lunch, my Mother would never sleep. She would take her kitchen utensils and with those she and I would dig the rocky, white ant infested surrounding. We planted flowering bushes. The white ants destroyed them. My mother brought ash from her chulha and mixed it in the earth and we planted the seedlings all over again. This time, they bloomed. At that time, my father's transfer order came.

A few neighbors told my mother why she was taking so much pain to beautify a government house, why she was planting seeds that would only benefit the next occupant. My mother replied that it did not matter to her that she would not see the flowers in full bloom. She said, "I have to create a bloom in a desert and whenever I am given a new place, I must leave it more beautiful than what I had inherited". That was my first lesson in success. It is not about what you create for yourself, it is what you leave behind that defines success.

My mother began developing a cataract in her eyes when I was very small. At that time, the eldest among my brothers got a teaching job at the University in Bhubaneswar and had to prepare for the civil services examination. So, it was decided that my Mother would move to cook for him and, as her appendage, I had to move too. For the first time in my life, I saw electricity in homes and water coming out of a tap. It was around 1965 and the country was going to war with Pakistan. My mother was having problems reading and in any case, being Bengali, she did not know the Oriya script. So, in addition to my daily chores, my job was to read her the local newspaper - end to end. That created in me a sense of connectedness with a larger world. I began taking interest in many different things. While reading out news about the war, I felt that I was fighting the war myself. She and I discussed the daily news and built a bond with the larger universe. In it, we became part of a larger reality. Till date, I measure my success in terms of that sense of larger connectedness.

Meanwhile, the war raged and India was fighting on both fronts. Lal Bahadur Shastri, the then Prime Minster, coined the term "Jai Jawan, Jai Kisan" and galvanized the nation in to patriotic fervor. Other than reading out the newspaper to my mother, I had no clue about how I could be part of the action. So, after reading her the newspaper, every day I would land up near the University's water tank, which served the community. I would spend hours under it, imagining that there could be spies who would come to poison the water and I had to watch for them. I would daydream about catching one and how the next day, I would be featured in the newspaper. Unfortunately for me, the spies at war ignored the sleepy town of Bhubaneswar and I never got a chance to catch one in action. Yet, that act unlocked my imagination. Imagination is everything. If we can imagine a future, we can create it, if we can create that future, others will live in it. That is the essence of success.

Over the next few years, my mother's eyesight dimmed but in me she created a larger vision, a vision with which I continue to see the world and, I sense, through my eyes, she was seeing too. As the next few years unfolded, her vision deteriorated and she was operated for cataract. I remember when she returned after her operation and she saw my face clearly for the first time, she was astonished. She said, "Oh my God, I did not know you were so fair". I remain mighty pleased with that adulation even till date. Within weeks of getting her sight back, she developed a corneal ulcer and, overnight, became blind in both eyes. That was 1969. She died in 2002. In all those 32 years of living with blindness, she never complained about her fate even once. Curious to know what she saw with blind eyes, I asked her once if she sees darkness. She replied, "No, I do not see darkness. I only see light even with my eyes closed". Until she was eighty years of age, she did her morning yoga everyday, swept her own room and washed her own clothes. To me, success is about the sense of independence; it is about not seeing the world but seeing the light.

Over the many intervening years, I grew up, studied, joined the industry and began to carve my life's own journey. I began my life as a clerk in a government office, went on to become a Management Trainee with the DCM group and eventually found my life's calling with the IT industry when fourth generation computers came to India in 1981. Life took me places - I worked with outstanding people, challenging assignments and traveled all over the world. In 1992, while I was posted in the US, I learnt that my father, living a retired life with my eldest brother, had suffered a third degree burn injury and was admitted in the Safdarjung Hospital in Delhi. I flew back to attend to him - he remained for a few days in critical stage, bandaged from neck to toe.

The Safdarjung Hospital is a cockroach infested, dirty, inhuman place. The overworked, under-resourced sisters in the burn ward are both victims and perpetrators of dehumanized life at its worst. One morning, while attending to my father, I realized that the blood bottle was empty and fearing that air would go into his vein, I asked the attending nurse to change it. She bluntly told me to do it myself. In that horrible theater of death, I was in pain and frustration and anger. Finally when she relented and came, my father opened his eyes and murmured to her, "Why have you not gone home yet?" Here was a man on his deathbed but more concerned about the overworked nurse than his own state. I was stunned at his stoic self. There I learnt that there is no limit to how concerned you can be for another human being and what the limit of inclusion is you can create. My father died the next day.

He was a man whose success was defined by his principles, his frugality, his universalism and his sense of inclusion. Above all, he taught me that success is your ability to rise above your discomfort, whatever may be your current state. You can, if you want, raise your consciousness above your immediate surroundings. Success is not about building material comforts - the transistor that he never could buy or the house that he never owned. His success was about the legacy he left, the mimetic continuity of his ideals that grew beyond the smallness of an ill-paid, unrecognized government servant's world.

My father was a fervent believer in the British Raj. He sincerely doubted the capability of the post-independence Indian political parties to govern the country. To him, the lowering of the Union Jack was a sad event. My mother was the exact opposite. When Subhash Chandra Bose quit the Indian National Congress and came to Dacca, my mother, then a schoolgirl, garlanded him. She learnt to spin khadi and joined an underground movement that trained her in using daggers and swords.

Consequently, our household saw diversity in the political outlook of the two. On major issues concerning the world, the Old Man and the Old Lady had differing opinions. In them, we learnt the power of disagreements, of dialogue and the essence of living with diversity in thinking. Success is not about the ability to create a definitive dogmatic end state; it is about the unfolding of thought processes, of dialogue and continuum.

Two years back, at the age of eighty-two, Mother had a paralytic stroke and was lying in a government hospital in Bhubaneswar. I flew down from the US where I was serving my second stint, to see her. I spent two weeks with her in the hospital as she remained in a paralytic state. She was neither getting better nor moving on. Eventually I had to return to work. While leaving her behind, I kissed her face. In that paralytic state and a garbled voice, she said, "Why are you kissing me, go kiss the world." Her river was nearing its journey, at the confluence of life and death, this woman who came to India as a refugee, raised by a widowed mother, no more educated than high school, married to an anonymous government servant whose last salary was Rs 300, robbed of her eyesight by fate and crowned by adversity - was telling me to go and kiss the world!

Success to me is about Vision. It is the ability to rise above the immediacy of pain. It is about imagination. It is about sensitivity to small people. It is about building inclusion. It is about connectedness to a larger world existence. It is about personal tenacity. It is about giving back more to life than you take out of it. It is about creating extraordinary success with ordinary lives.

Thank you very much; I wish you good luck and Godspeed. Go, kiss the world."

Thursday, October 17, 2013

Public Speaking Tips**



Eliminate the unknown 
We always fear the unknown. So the more unknown things you can eliminate, the less fear you will experience. And knowing your topic inside out is a good first step – one less thing to worry about. If you can, also check any technical elements. A technical rehearsal can remove your fear of slides not working, microphones failing or how it feels to be at that podium. All of these can improve your confidence that everything will be all right on the night – including you. 

Rehearse out loud 
Rehearsing the presentation or speech in your head is not the same as saying it aloud. You’ll be amazed at how speaking your presentation aloud will immediately highlight the bits that don’t work, aren’t clear or would trip up your tongue on the day. 

Stop reading 
 Reading from a script or detailed cards can become a crutch that prevents you from presenting well. You might feel safer, but reading can often trip us up while making us sound less comfortable. However, if you know your topic well enough, each slide should be enough of a prompt for you to remember the information and speak naturally. 

Ignore mistakes 
We are always more aware of every quiver of our voice, every ‘umm’ and ‘ah’, every fluffed word than anyone else. Ask the audience afterwards and you may be surprised that they didn’t notice your nervousness or fluffs at all. But if you comment on your mistakes on stage, it can further dent your confidence and alert the audience that things aren’t quite right. So never draw attention to your mistakes or nerves – simply move on as if everything is exactly as it should be. 

** By Jonathan Crossfield in www.worklife.roberthalf.com.au

Tuesday, December 11, 2012

Know your money!

These pieces of paper (all current legal tender) are not all equal. Some worth considerably more than others.

So, if you were carrying a wad of notes, playing at money laundering, pimp or just to impress, the Singaporean $10,000 probably your currency of choice... just saying.

1.  SGD  10,000   Singapore      = A$7,803







2.  CHF  1,000    Switzerland    = A$1,022
 






3.  EUR  500      Euro           = A$618








4.  JPY  10,000   Japan          = A$116








5.  AUD  100      Aussie         = A$100




6.  CAD  100      Canada         = A$97
 






 7.  USD  100     USA            = A$95
 






8.  GBP  50       UK             = A$77








Other "impressive" denominations

9.  BRL  100          Brazil       A$46
10. KRW  50,000    Korea       A$44
11. IDR  1,000       India        A$18
12. IDR  100,000   Indonesia  A$10

Wednesday, August 4, 2010

Heartwarming Australian pretzels

Article by Dr Oliver Marc Hartwich (Research Fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies) in the Business Spectator

Next time you go to Sydney’s Queen Victoria Building you should visit the basement. There, nestled between an accessories store and an Asian fast food outlet, you can learn a practical lesson in successful immigration policy. It can teach you all you need to know about why the integration of migrants is working in Australia and why it is failing in Europe.

To find this place, just follow your nose to the smell of freshly baked sunflower seed bread, apple cinnamon crumble and pretzel-dough rolls. The Lüneburger bakery is a little piece of bread and cake heaven right in the heart of Sydney. Every day, it serves thousands of hungry commuters with a selection of German-style pastries. To add to the perfect illusion of a traditional German bakery, the shop assistants speak with German accents. Even the shop furniture is made in Germany.

None of this would be of any significance for immigration policies if the owner were your average German baker. But the half-bald 47-year-old running the Lüneburger business does not quite look like someone who comes from the Black Forest. And his name, Ahmet Yaltirakli, does not sound very German either.

In fact Yaltirakli was born in Istanbul, Turkey, and migrated to Cologne with his parents when he was 11. Like many other children of Turkish "guest workers" living in Germany, he got only a very basic school education and was subsequently apprenticed as an electrician.

An acquaintance of the family then offered Yaltirakli another apprenticeship as a goldsmith in the early 1980s. Sadly, as it turned out years later, his new employer lacked the formal qualification to teach. In the end, Yaltirakli was left with little else but enough practical skills to open a small jewellery repair business in one of the poorer and predominantly Turkish neighbourhoods of Cologne.

Yaltirakli worked hard. However, there was no escape from his existence as an ambitious yet underqualified manual labourer. Besides, even though he may have spent most of his life in Germany and despite his German passport, he always remained a Turk in the eyes of mainstream society. His family background was the glass ceiling he simply could not break.

If Ahmet Yaltirakli had not switched on his TV one Sunday afternoon back in 1996 he would still be fixing Turkish necklaces and armbands in Cologne. Instead, he watched a documentary about Australia. The pictures of this faraway and exotic place were so enticing that only three days later Yaltirakli and his family were sitting on an Australia-bound plane, willing to explore the country for themselves.

They fell in love with Australia immediately and spent another three holidays travelling around the continent. In 2002, they sold everything they had in Germany and arrived in Sydney with little more than a business visa, a modest amount of cash and a collection of Italian wedding rings that Yaltirakli hoped to distribute in Australia.

A Turkish-born German selling Italian wedding rings in Australia? It may have been too ambitious a plan, and Yaltirakli soon had to find another venture. So he acquired a franchise licence for an ice cream and chocolates parlour. But as he had to discover, Australians don’t buy enough ice cream in winter and not enough chocolates in summer. Again he failed, suffering heavy losses.

After two business fiascos, with few contacts in Australia and nothing but his entrepreneurial spirit, Yaltirakli went for his final attempt: to open a German-style bakery. He was missing good German breads; all his German friends in Sydney told him the same; and when he found a way to import deep frozen dough from Germany, a business idea was born. He was clutching at straws.

All that was still needed was a more German-sounding name than Yaltirakli. He settled on Lüneburger. Not that he had ever been to the historic city of Lüneburg, but you just can’t get more German than that, with the umlaut dots on the "u", he thought.

The first shop in Sydney’s QVB opened in late December 2005, and Lüneburger took off to become more than your average bread and butter business. Regularly putting in 80 to 90 hours a week, Yaltirakli managed to establish seven shops in Sydney. In a few weeks’ time he will open his first bakery in Melbourne. "And this, for sure, is not going to be the end of my ambitions," he says.

Looking back over his turbulent career, Yaltirakli is certain he would never have succeeded in Germany. "In Australia, it is much easier to become a part of society," he says. "If you have an idea, you can make it. In Germany, you will always remain a bit of an outsider and people will judge you by your name and your looks."

Little wonder, then, that Yaltirakli is now employing more than 70 people in Sydney and Melbourne and not in Cologne or Hamburg. Australia gave him the welcome he and his family were looking for. It did not put obstacles in the way of his business ventures. For him it became the place in which you can try, fail and start again to eventually succeed.

The contrast to Yaltirakli’s Turkish compatriots who remained in Germany could not be more stark. In Berlin, which has the largest resident Turkish community outside Turkey, three-quarters of all Turkish migrants lack any school qualifications (compared with only 15 percent of all German-born Berliners). Consequently, nearly half the unemployed in Berlin are of Turkish origin. And almost 40 per cent of all Berlin-based Turks receive most of their income in the form of welfare payments.

The failed integration of Turkish migrants into German society has many causes. Many migrants lacked the will to assimilate, while mainstream society showed a corresponding reluctance to accept the newcomers. The lack of education and the stifling effects of welfare dependency only made the process of integration even more difficult.

If Germany needs an example of the human potential lying dormant in its Turkish community it should study the case of Ahmet Yaltirakli closely. And if Australians need reminding why migrants can be a great benefit to society, they should look at his case, too.

Ask him about it next time you buy your Turkish-German-Australian pretzels.