Have you ever conducted a job interview and found yourself scouring the internet looking for the right questions to ask your candidates? Most interviews consist of the same questions, and savvy job seekers have memorized their answers to give you exactly what you want to hear. These are the ten most popular interview questions, tell me if you’ve heard these before:
- Tell me about yourself.
- Why do you want to work here?
- Why should I hire you?
- What did you like/dislike from your last job?
- Where do you see yourself in 5 years?
- What accomplishments are you most proud of?
- How do you deal with pressure/stress?
- How do you take direction?
- What is the most difficult situation you have faced?
- Do you prefer working alone or with others?
So how do you separate the potential stars from the duds?
Hiring Employees for Personality
The answer is, to hell with experience, if you want to hire great employees you need to hire for personality! And don’t just interview, take the time to learn your candidates’ personality.
When there is an employee vacancy and you need to hire someone, most companies dust off the job description that was created ten years ago and use that to create a recruiting ad. You need something more dynamic than that to uncover a future winner in the interview process. Here’s what your job profiles need to tell you:
- What talents do the ‘stars’ have that others don’t?
- What must they ‘do’, vs. what must they ‘have’?
- What talents are needed to be successful, not just what the job entails?
What I recommend is to create a set of adjectives that describe the type of person you are looking for and match the skill-set of the job you’re looking to fill. Then during the interview process, ask probing questions that will help you discover if your candidate matches those personality traits. For example, you could list a set of eight adjectives that describe your potential hire:
- Team Player
- Sense of Humour
- Eager
- Fast Paced
- Confident
- Energetic
- Personable
- Knowledgeable of Current Events
Now during your job interview you can ask questions to uncover these traits. If a candidate doesn’t match at least five of these eight adjectives, you should move on to the next interview.
Using these job recruiting techniques when hiring employees can help you stand out at your company as someone who is not going to follow the conventional route, someone who thinks outside the box to hire great people. After all, selecting winners to work at your company can be a defining moment in your own career.
Do you conduct interviews at your job? What tips do you have to hire great employees?
When my children were born I believed it was important for them to get a post secondary education (yes, even at that early age) and I planned to save as much as I could for that purpose. Of course, there was no RESP at that time, but I did receive monthly Universal Family Allowance payments (starting at $16 for my first child).
Saving For Post Secondary Education
Savings and investment options were very limited at that time, especially for small amounts and I dutifully deposited the Family Allowance (or Baby Bonus as it was called) into a savings account. When I had sufficient funds, I purchased Canada Savings Bonds each year. As mentioned in previous posts, I subsequently purchased mutual funds and (for my youngest son) real estate. From those small initial deposits they ended up with over $30,000 each by the time they finished their post secondary education.
With all the options available these days I think one could easily double or triple that amount (and more). An RESP (Registered Education Savings Plan) is the obvious first choice and the Education Savings Grant of up to $600 annually is a nice bonus to help increase your returns. If you are eligible for the Child Tax Benefit you can start an RESP with the Canada Learning Bond of $500 to start with and $100 a year until your child turn 15 years of age, without even putting a penny of your own money towards it.
Another way to save for post secondary education is to open a regular investment account as an informal trust. The account is in your name “in trust” – you don’t have to name a beneficiary. This is what I did. There are no restrictions on the amount you invest, you are not penalized if your child doesn’t attend a post secondary institution and you retain ownership and control of the account and can access the money at any time for any purpose.
Until your child reaches the age of majority, you have to pay tax on any interest or dividend income and your child pays tax on any capital gains and reinvested interest or dividends. For this reason, growth mutual funds are a popular choice for informal trusts.
Any income earned from invested Child Tax Benefit payments deposited into a non-registered “in trust” account is taxed in the child’s hands. Just make sure you keep records tracing the investments back to these payments in case you’re audited by the taxman.
It may seem daunting when you see what tuition may cost in eighteen years but you’ll be amazed to see how fast your savings can grow after the first couple of years. Just remember:
- Start early, invest regularly and stay the course (Hmm, I think I’ve heard this before)
- Don’t make unnecessary withdrawals (fund that trip to Disneyland some other way)
- Review your investments periodically. New investment options are available all the time. Be sure to investigate and do your due diligence to see if they fit with your objectives and circumstances. You don’t have to stick with the same plan indefinitely if a better option comes your way.
Finally, once you’ve started your savings plan, don’t worry about it. Enjoy your children now, while they still think you’re wonderful.
Check out The RESP Book to understand how RESP accounts work and how to get one started, what kind of RESP account to set up and what kind of investments to buy.
A few weeks ago I met with our mortgage specialist at TD Canada Trust to discuss the process of upgrading our house. With a growing family, one of our goals is to move out of our 2 bedroom 1 bathroom house and build a larger house closer to where I work. This is an exciting time for us, however there are a few things for us to consider during this process:
- How much can we afford to spend on our new house?
- How much will our down payment be?
- When do we put our house up for sale?
The bank determines how much you can afford to spend on a house by looking at your income, your debt expenses including loans, leases, credit cards, and line of credit, as well as your estimated monthly heating costs and property taxes. Then they look at your down payment amount and the interest rate that you will be paying.
Related: Changing The Way We Think About Mortgages
In order to qualify for a mortgage, you must qualify at the 5 year fixed rate, even if you opt for a variable rate or shorter fixed term. The current 5 year fixed rate is 5.29 percent. We will likely choose between a variable rate mortgage or a 1 year fixed rate mortgage, as both will likely save you money over the 5 year fixed rate.
The minimum required down payment for a mortgage is 5 percent. Any down payment amount less than 20 percent is subject to CMHC fees, which is mortgage loan insurance that lenders are required to purchase for high-ratio mortgages. The lender passes on those fees to the consumers, which are between 1 – 3 percent of the mortgage value. A $300,000 mortgage with a 10 percent down payment would be subject to a 2 percent CMHC fee, which would add an extra $6,000 to your mortgage. We want to put at least 20 percent down on our new house to avoid CMHC fees.
The builder that we would like to work with typically takes between 4 and 5 months to build a house. This leaves us with a few options for our existing house. We can put it up for sale immediately upon beginning construction of our new house, and hopefully the timing will work out between our possession date of the new place and the sale and possession of our current house. Or we can try and sell our house prior to starting construction of our new house, but then we will have to find a place to rent while the new house is being built.
The other option is to enter into an “intent to purchase” with our builder, which means they would start building our house and we would put our current house up for sale, but after 3 months if we haven’t sold our house we can opt out of the agreement. The drawback to that option is that we most likely wouldn’t get to customize the house to our tastes, since the builder would want the house as close to the original plan as possible in case we don’t buy it and they have to sell the house to someone else.
As you can see there is a lot to consider in this process. In Part Two, I will discuss how we intend to proceed with upgrading our house. Stay tuned.