Top 20 Most Difficult Company Interviews

 Top 20 Most Difficult Company Interviews 

1. McKinsey & Co.

HQ: New York, N.Y.

Industry: Consulting

 Question: Mom and pop music shop wants to grow with stiff competition. How should they go about it? Calculate customer lifetime value.

 2. Jane Street Capital

HQ: New York, N.Y.

Industry: Investment Banking

 Question: You have 2 decks of cards (each deck contains both red and black cards). One deck has twice the number of cards in the other deck with the same color ration (so one deck has 52 cards and the other has 104, both half red and half black). I offer you to play a game. First you get to chose which deck of cards you want to play with. Second, you draw 2 cards at random from your deck of choice. If both are red, then I will give you a ferarri. Which deck of cards would you chose?

3. Cree

HQ: Durham, N.C.

Industry: Display Components

 Question: How many barbers do you need in a city of 1 million people?

 4. Bain & Co.

HQ: Boston, Mass.

Industry: Consulting

 Question: Help me estimate how many car dealerships there are in the United States?

5. Boston Consulting

HQ: Boston, Mass.

Industry: Consulting

 Question: How many golf balls can fit in a 747?

6. Palantir Technologies

 HQ: Palo Alto, Calif.

Industry: Enterprise Application Integration Software

 Question: How would you test an elevator to see if it is safe to ride?

 

7. Teach for America

 HQ: New York, N.Y.

Industry: Education

Question: You want to take the third graders on a field trip to the zoo, but there is no extra funding to do so. You must ask the principal to reconsider and allow your students to go on the field trip. Explain how you would persuade the principal.

 

8. A.T. Kearney

 HQ: Chicago, Ill.

Industry: Consulting

 Question: Can you tell me how many airplanes fly out of O'hare in a given day?

9. Red Ventures

 HQ: Indian Land, S.C.

Industry: Direct Marketing Services

 Question: If you were an animal, what animal would you be?

 10. BP

 HQ: London, United Kingdom

Industry: Oil & Gas Refining, Marketing & Distribution

 Question: If you had to change a tire, how would you do it?

 11. ZS Associates

 HQ: Evanston, Ill.

Industry: Consulting

 Question:: It is your first day, you have no clue about the work and you have been asked to solve a tough problem. How will you go about it ?

 12. Procter & Gamble

 HQ: Cincinnati, Ohio

Industry: Personal Care Products

 Question: Tell me a time when you had to demonstrate your leadership skills?

 13. Salesforce.com

 HQ: San Francisco, Calif.

Industry: Customer Relationship Management, Marketing & Sales Software

 Question: How do you look for SQL injections?

14. Altria

 HQ: Richmond, Va.

Industry: Cigarettes, Cigars, & Smokeless Tobacco Products

 Question: Describe a very hectic week and what you did to prioritize.

15. Oliver Wyman

 HQ: New York, N.Y.

Industry: Consulting

 Question: Estimate the percentage of the US which is covered by man-made structures.

 16. Bridgewater Associates

 HQ: Westport, Conn.

Industry: Consulting

 Question: How would you explain your job to an aunt or uncle who is not familiar with that industry?

 

17. Stryker

 HQ: Kalamazoo, Mich.

Industry: Medical Equipment & Supplies

 Question: Would you say you learn a lot about a little, or a little about a lot?

 18. Amazon.com

 HQ: Seattle, Wash.

Industry: Music, Video, Book & Entertainment Retail

 Question: Come up with a formula to calculate the angle between the hour hand and the minute hand in a clock.

19. eBay

HQ: San Jose, Calif.

Industry: Internet Auctions

 Question: It's known that an egg broke when dropped from the 100th floor. Given two eggs, how do you figure out the highest floor an egg can be dropped from without breaking?

20. Gallup

 HQ: Washington, D.C.

Industry: Consulting

Question: How did you prepare for our interview?

Sources : 

1. http://jobs.aol.com/articles/2011/06/20/top-20-most-difficult-companies-for-interviews/

2. http://fcsl.edu/blogs/pp/2012/02/24/competency-based-questions-in-interviews/

Why Does a Salad Cost More than a Big Mac?

source : http://fredtopeka.files.wordpress.com/2008/04/pyramid.jpg

Communication skills among Malaysian University students

 Communication skills among Malaysian University students

 

 Waning communication skills among fresh university graduates are among some of the unspoken concerns employers have brought up in recent years. "We have encountered many graduates who cannot speak nor write proper English. Many are not able to transfer their academic knowledge or articulate their thoughts during interviews due to poor command of English and this have cost them jobs in the corporate sector.” says Melissa Norman, Managing Director of Kelly Services , one of the top head-hunter agencies in Malaysia.

English and the importance of communication skills took a shift from the British colonisation era when the national language Bahasa Malaysia was implemented as the common language medium in lower and higher tertiary education sometime in the 1980’s.  It apparently used to be easier for Malaysian students in Britain to get a part-time job or internship there. An Engineering lecturer at a local public university who only wants to be known as Mar recalls how it was back then. “Mention you are Malaysian and you will get one foot in the door. In fact, we spoke better English then than most Europeans. But, of course, that was in the1980s.”

Steady Decline of Communication skills

The declining standards of English among the young in Malaysia is  mainly attributed to policies that have not emphasized this importance. According to former Human Resource Minister Tan Sri Dr Fong Chan Onn, who related his experience as an external examiner “In the 1980s, the standard of English in most of the answer scripts was still good but in the 1990s, there was a marked decline, so much so the examiners agreed to only assess the facts and leave the writing style and grammar alone. If they had marked the language as well, many of the students would have had low marks.” 

A stern measure or solution has to be design and implemented to salvage the current status quo. Multiple teaching aids are already in place especially for countries who practices English as second language.

What are your thoughts on this ? Do you think communication skills among Malaysian students today has taken a hit ?

- article written in support of International Universities Debating Tournament MMU UADC 2012  (http://www.mmuuadc2012.org/)