When I was younger, I used to have a very different approach toward job interviews. I used to see them as one-sided events where you had to prove your worthiness as a potential employee rather than as a two-way street.

As I’ve developed professionally, though, I came to realize that the point of interviewing shouldn’t just mean rote memorization, giving correct answers, and asking the right
questions. Interviews are also a rare opportunity to have a dialogue with an insider, one that should be taken advantage of to really understand whether the company you’re interviewing with is “right” for you.

Business school will teach you that you should always have questions for your interviewer in order to appear interested and enthusiastic about the company, and there are even lists of typical questions you can ask. Those are fine, but they’ll seldom get you to the crux of the matter, things like whether the company and group you’re interviewing with has good prospects, good leadership, and whether you’d enjoy working there.

I’ve found the best way to get to the heart of the matter is by asking the right probing and, yes, even atypical, daring questions. But the key to all this is that you must also have some answers to these same questions about the company that you’ve concluded yourself so that you have something to compare their responses to.

Having gone through interviews recently, here’s a list of things I did to prepare my questions and the type of questions I asked almost all my interviewers in one form or another. I happen to focus on questions related to “finance’s role in the company” because that’s my area, but you could easily customize it to whatever functional area you’re interested in:

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Pamela Slim over at Escape from Cubicle Nation has shared some advice that I thought worth reprinting here. She’s written an article called Traps to avoid when discussing your career with relatives over the holidays. I think it’s a very timely reminder of the oh-so-fun things that can come up whenever families get together — ever seen a competitive Asian family get-together? It’s not pretty — and how to deal with it all.

Here are a few highlights I particularly enjoyed:

Trap: Thinking your relatives understand that you have changed since your failed lemonade business in fifth grade. Try as we might, it is so hard to break the stereotypes that our relatives have about us based on what they saw when we were growing up. “You could never stick to one thing, Martha, you were always distracted in your studies”, etc. Even if they don’t come right out and say it, you can often feel their disapproval based on their body language or tone of voice.

Solution: Change your expectations. You will never be able to convince your family you have outgrown your innate shyness, so stop trying. Show results by your actions. If you get too frustrated in a conversation, smile and change the subject quickly. The worst thing you can do is argue your point. You will never win, and will most likely revert to acting like a 10 year old.

Trap: Thinking they understand the changing job market. Older relatives may be perplexed by the fact that the average person now has seven careers in their lifetime. They grew up in a world where the best career security was finding a good job in a good company and staying until retirement. Lots of job changes was seen as being irresponsible, unstable and less desirable for employment.

Solution: Come armed with a nice “elevator speech” about today’s job market so that you can help them see that you are not outside of the norm. “25% of women in their mid-40s are successfully starting businesses, Uncle Milt,” or recite the “7 career per lifetime” statistic above. If they still don’t get it, let it go and change the subject.

Pam’s listed some other good tips, like cutting down on the jargon and limiting yourself to a few minutes’ time when discussing your work instead of risking boring others around you, plus advice on how to keep calm when things get exasperating. I received the list because I subscribe to her email newsletter, which you can do through this link if you’re interested. It’s good stuff!

Working Mother magazine has just come out with the best 100 companies for working moms. They evaluated companies based on “workforce profile, compensation, child care, flexibility, time off and leaves, family-friendly programs and company culture.” Here are the top 10:

1. Abbott Laboratories
2. Bon Secours Richmond Health System in Virginia
3. Ernst & Young LLP
4. HSBC-North America
5. IBM Corp.
6. J. P. Morgan Chase
7. Patagonia Inc.
8. PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP
9. Principal Financial Group
10. S.C. Johnson & Son Inc.

Some highlights from the companies who made the list: plenty of flex-time offered and used; maternity leaves of 6 months or more; on-site childcare centers; compressed schedules allowed, including some companies that allow 20 hours per week of work to qualify for benefits; and many others. If anyone who works at these companies (or others listed) cares to comment on real examples of how these policies work, please do!

According to a recent WSJ article, fewer parents are encouraging their kids to make the same career choices they did.

This rings true for me: my father, a pathologist, made it abundantly clear to both my brother and me that he didn’t think being a doctor was the wisest career to choose, thanks to escalating insurance costs and a demanding lifestyle. Instead, he always thought the business world was the one to be in. Of course, the grass always looks greener, perhaps….

For my part, I’d encourage my kids to be more entrepreneurial, though that doesn’t mean that’s the path I want them to take. I simply wished I had been exposed to and developed a savvy, street-smart sense of business a little earlier in life. I’ve also not been afraid to try different roles, or take positions in smaller companies and startups (some worked, some didn’t), and I’d probably encourage my children to do the same.

What about you? Would you encourage or discourage your child to go into your profession?

To lighten up my recent spate of posts, I wanted to share a case study about Semco, a Brazilian manufacturing company. Its story is actually not new, and the founder’s son, Richard Semler, wrote a book entitled Maverick: The Success Story Behind the World’s Most Unusual Workplace over a decade ago.

In many ways, Semco represents what many might consider an “ideal” working environment: transparent salaries, a completely flat or non-existent management structure, autonomous working groups, democratic decision-making, etc. Sound a bit anti-capitalistic? Probably the most surprising thing of all is that these radical-sounding ideas have made the company very successful by almost any measure you can choose.

Perhaps part of this is helped somewhat by certain Brazilian employment laws, but I’m sure Semco’s approach could still be easily adapted to other countries. The curious thing is, why aren’t there more examples of companies that run anything like this?

Sadly, we didn’t cover this case in our organizational behavior class when I was at school, but I here’s a short case study about Semco (originally posted free-of-charge at a link at Thunderbird) that’s worth reading or maybe even sharing with others at work. Who knows, maybe someone else out there might be willing to give Semco’s ideas a try!