Answer: Here is a list of basic questions they will are very likely to ask you:

• Have you ever been in sales before? If so, what was your closing ratio?
• What do you know about our company/products/industry?
• What is the most difficult problem you have ever solved?
• Explain a time when you have worked effectively under pressure.
• Explain something that you have attempted and failed. What did you do next?
• How do you feel that your personal or academic background fits with the position that you are seeking?
• What do you believe will be the biggest challenges of this position?

The demand-supply situation for job is highly favorable towards the employers, i.e., htere are more candidates than jobs. Try to share examples from your past work, and if possible, ask the intervieweers to call your previous managers, or references on the phone. Positive references help a lot in all kinds of job interviews, from entry level jobs to the senior  executives, and company board positions.

All the best!

Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant had an explosion today after the nuclear core could not cool down due to lack of cooling system, which went down due to the earthquake damage. Though the plant crew tried to bring the reactor’s temperature down during the last 24 hours, the manual effort was not enough compared to the coolant requirements for the nuclear reactor. And the explosion of the reactor building is an indication that manual cooling was not successful, and now radiation leakage is on. Workers at the Fukushima Daiichi plant plan to flood the reactor containment structure with sea water to bring the reactor’s temperature down to safe levels, which may take two days. Radiation levels are said to have fallen since the explosion but authorities have expanded the evacuation to include a radius of 20 km.

This accident is the worst case scenario in nuclear power plant design, because two natural disasters have struck in quick succession: massive 8.9 richter scale earthquake, and then a tsunami. Even the back up systems failed. There will be many important lessons from this accident on improving design of nuclear power plants. The reporter from Russia Today asks a valid question: how safe is it to have a nuclear power plant in an earthquake prone area? Each country will make its own decisions based on their energy requirements, still its worth discussing this aspect in the near future.

It is being estimated that about $15 billion loss is covered by insurance in the current earthquake plus tsunami in Japan. But that does not consider any damage from nuclear radiation consequence, which in healthcare costs could be 5-10x more spread over many years. So as long as nuclear radiation is contained in this case, all other losses can be recouped in a short time, except the loss of people.

Wishing rapid recovery to the people of Japan.

Obama Signs $938 billion Healthcare Bill

Domains For Sale from Prime Generic Domains

This is an Insurance marketplace where insurance buyers can get quotes from various insurance sellers. Till now, there was no such website to provide this service in India. Based on feedback so far, the site offers a very useful service.

Many buyers of insurance products today want reliable services that be purchased online, or using phone plus email. The site is currently registering insurance sellers (agents/ brokers/ companies) for the sell side, and expects to have 100+ insurance sellers by December 2009, which will enable competitive offers to insurance buyers coming to the site. IndiaInsuranceMart.com

It’s a long video… if you are in a rush, here’s our summary of the various Q&A:

Q1. What do you look for in the people you like to work with?
WB: I like to work with people I like. I don’t look at their CVs or Grades to decide who can do what. In fact, I don’t even look if they have a degree. If you are working with people you don’t enjoy, please do yourself a favour, and leave the job and work with people you like. You’ll do better.

Q2. What kind of businesses do you like to invest in?
WB: I want to invest in businesses that are stable and where I can visualize it 10 years from now. Companies like Coke (soft drinks), Gillette (mens shaving blades) are examples of my investment choices. There are many others like GEICO (automotive insurance), Nebraska Furniture Mart (maximum sales from a single store location in the US), Iscar Metalworking Company (an industry leader in metal-cutting tools from Israel). I don’t have the understanding of technology-intensive business like software etc, and I stay away from them.

Q3. How do you do business valuation? How detailed is it?
WB: I like to invest in businesses where I have great comfort with the business owner. A paragraph is often sufficient to know the business value. The example being Nebraska Furniture Mart owned by Mrs. Rose Blumpkin, who recently turned 101 years, who has no formal education but has great common sense.

Q4. Tell us some of your bad decisions and what you learned from them?
WB: I invested in US Air though it was a difficult sector. Call it Temporary Insanity. I have learned that my bad decisions have happened when I had more cash than necessary. The airline industry is one step forward for mankind, a giant step backward for capitalism! And then there are other mistakes that conventional accounting does not capture, like the selling of 5% stake in Walt Disney (at $6m) within a year of buying it (at $4mn) in the 1960s. Today that stake is worth over a billion dollars.

Q5. Why not split the Berkshire Hathaway share to make it more affordable to investors?
WB: I think of my investors as a club or an audience in my presentation and we want long-term investors not traders. I don’t want high trading volumes for our shares. In fact, I will be happy with no trading at all. Our share price ($25k per share in recent times) has helped us maintain that seriousness and attract long-term investors.

Thanks for coming by!
MyOrbit Team