8 Websites That Give You Tips On Job Interview Questions and Answers

Facing a job interview board probably comes right below public speaking on a fear list. Many of us liken it to a third-degree interrogation. But heck, do a few and you’ll find it’s not too bad at all. Every veteran interviewee will tell you that being prepared is half the battle won. A technical interview might be a different ball game though.

Sometimes, the most matter of fact questions can knock you off kilter. The ‘tell me about yourself’ interview ice-breaker makes the ‘most difficult interview questions’ list quite often. A smart off the cuff answer works, but it works better if you have the answer prepared.

If preparation is the key, browse through these eight interview websites and bulletproof your job search with the wealth of technical and non-technical interview questions and answers listed there.

CareerCup

Careercup is a resource of tech interview questions from companies like Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and a lot of others. The site was started in 2005, so to date the bank of questions is 3,000 strong. You can trawl through the questions by using the dropdown for Companies, Job Titles, and Topics. The answers and solutions are supplied by the community of readers. You can add your own interview questions and also engage with others in the chat room.

Glassdoor

We have featured this free career website and community before but it was as a salary comparison tool. Since then, the site has come out of beta and developed into a deeper microscope for the job market with company reviews, salary comparisons, and interview tips. The site lists interview questions across the spectrum of job listings from sales to technology. The site is well organized with each company getting a page that starts with an overview and hives off into details like interview difficulty rating, questions asked, and other information like background checks, interview schedules, etc. It’s definitely is one of the better job information sites out there.

Monster

The go-to site for career and job listing information has a well covered career advice section with a section devoted to interviewing. Check out all the articles listed under The Tough Questions. A few hints from How to Answer Five Difficult Interview Questions and 100 Potential Interview Questions should help you ace any interview.

Job Search (About.com)

The wide variety of guides on About.com is always more than useful. It’s the same with the roll of interview questions and best answers for each of them. Follow all the links and check them out.

Management Consulting Case Interviews

We move away from all the general and technical interview websites with this one. As the name says, the site is all about in-depth interview questions for those who are interested in getting into management consulting. The case studies are arranged by type, industry, and consulting firm.

Xor Swap

The technical interview website is simple in looks but its list of actual interview questions asked by IT companies could be more than useful. Each question also has the answer and you can add your own. Filter the questions against the company using the list of companies on the right.

Geek Interview

The site of course, has a nicely laid out interview preparation section with a lot of questions for the software programmer or coder. The site leans towards the Indian IT scene but the questions should be universal for an IT interview. The site also has tutorials on technology, tech articles, career related articles, job postings, certification questions and guides, online tests and other study aids.

Common Interview

The website with a barebones search engine-like interface is actually a dynamic, community driven collection of most common general purpose and technical interview questions. The search box gave me a bunch of unrelated results (the Advanced Search targets them better), so I guess it’s better to use the menu on the top. Not all questions have answers but the collection of interview questions and answers is quite large.

Armed with the best answers, you can further polish your interview tackling skills with 5 Sites with Job Interview Tips to Help You Ace Your Interview or take the visual route with 5 Video Channels for Learning Basic Job Interview Skills. As you prepare for the next ‘blind date’ with the job board, let us know about the toughest interview question you ever had to counter.

Cool Websites

QRnote – If you are looking for a tool that will help you quickly setup a webpage and create its QR code for easy smartphone sharing , then you should pay a visit to QRnote. It is a free to use website that lets you create QR codes for notes. You add text with special formatting, images, contacts, calendars, and even HTML coding. Read more: Qrnote: Create Mini Websites & Their QR Codes

		UltimateChart – Do you want to stay in touch with the latest music? Do you want to know what people are listening to and what they like? If yes, then you need to regularly check in with the music rankings to know which songs are doing well with the fans. To do this, you should head on over to UltimateChart. Read more: UltimateChart: Shows Current Song Rankings Based On Many Online Music Sources
		Google eBookstore – is Google’s online store from where you can get more than 3 million eBooks. From novels to textbooks, self-help books to cookbooks, the eBook categories cover anything. The best part is that many of the available eBooks are free to download. On the eBookstore’s homepage you will first see a “best of the free” section where you can get the top free eBooks. Read more: Google eBookstore: eBook Store From Google
		Staffnote – is a free to use web service that provides you with an easy way to manage your staff’s attendance and communicate with them via messages and notes in a secure interface. After you create an account on the website you can add staff members to your Staffnote page. You assign a special password to each member so they can sign in and out of Staffnote and have their attendance recorded. Read more:Staffnote: Manage Staff Attendance In A Friendly & Secure Interface
		Where Did We Park? – At concerts and other crowded places it is often difficult to find where you parked your car because of the many rows of parked cars. Fortunately for Android phone owners there is a tool that uses GPS to help them in such a situation – this tool is called Where Did We Park? Lite, a simple GPS-using smartphone application for Android devices. With the application installed you can record the position of where you parked your car. Read more: Where Did We Park?: Stop Forgetting Where You Parked (Android)

World's 'first hack-free' software developed

It could provide a secure and reliable environment for mission-critical defence data, operating on the same platform as everyday applications like email

MELBOURNE: Scientists have developed what they claim is the world's first hack-free softwarewhich can protect systems from failure or malicious attacks.


The 'seL4' microkernel has been developed by a team led by Australia's ICT Research Centre of Excellence's spinout company -- Open Kernel Labs(OK Labs). It is a small operating system kernel which regulates access to a computer's hardware.


Its unique feature is that it has been mathematically proven to operate correctly, enabling it to separate trusted from untrusted software, protecting critical services from a failure or a malicious attack, say the scientists.


In future applications, seL4 could ensure that trusted financial transaction software from secure sources like banks or stock exchanges can operate securely on a customer's mobile phone alongside "untrusted" software, such as games downloaded from the Internet, according to its developers.


It could also provide a secure and reliable environment for mission-critical defence data, operating on the same platform as everyday applications like email. Or, it could protect the life-supporting functions of an implanted medical device, such as a pacemaker, from hacking, they say.


"Our seL4 microkernel is the only operating system kernel in existence whose source code has been mathematically proven to implement its specification correctly. Under the assumptions of the proof, the seL4 kernel for ARM11 will always do precisely what its specification says it will do," lead scientist Gerwin Klein said.


Added another scientist Gernot Heiser, "Verification of operating-system kernels has been attempted since the 1970s -- we pulled it off!"

BlackBerry PlayBook (and QNX powered smartphones) to run Android Apps?

This is one of the best and most hopeful rumors of 2011 yet. BGR is reporting that RIM is working on different ways to bring Android apps to the QNX powered tablet OS found on the PlayBook, plus any future QNX powered BlackBerry smartphones. This could be absolutely huge for RIM if they could even bring support for the apps to the BlackBerry table. Thanks to BGR who posted an exclusive about the Dalvik virtual machine. Keep reading…

This is exciting. We all have read the news about RIM looking into other options, and they have stated the fact they are considering different alternatives. With the latest acquisitions they have done, including the QNX OS, the news that BGR pointed out was that the Dalvik VM is one of the VM’s that RIM is looking into and that it’s the very same one that the Android OS uses. Perhaps they’re not looking into developing Android apps for the PlayBook, but perhaps allowing the user to run their apps as legacy support. This is huge news for those who keep wanting to have their Angry Birds and play it too! Keep your fingers crossed and lets see what RIM has in store.

And for the record, there’s not a version of Angry Birds for the BlackBerry…yet.

Lockerz – A Social Network For Entertainment & Rewards-Based Shopping

Specialized social networks are a thing of the future. With the huge success of Facebook, it’s no surprise that a lot of the newer sites out there – and most of the ones I write about - feature some kind of social features or centralized community.

Lockerz is one such site that takes advantage of both of those things. Lockerz is a social commerce company whose mission is “to be the homepage for men and women ages 13 to 30, building a community of trendsetters and tastemakers who love to shop, play, and connect on the web.” It’s a place where you can interact with others in the community while earning points you can use towards major discounts on your favorite items. Does that sound like something that might interest you?

What Exactly Is Lockerz?

As I mentioned in the introduction, Lockerz is a social commerce site. It was founded in 2009 by former technology and retail executive Kathy Savitt, who was formerly the vice president of strategic communications, content, and entertainment initiatives at Amazon. The Lockerz community has grown to more than 17 million members in less that one year, and the site offers major discounts on the best fashions, electronics, music, and more.

Members of the site earn PTZ (points), which are used to lower the prices on your favorite merchandise. PTZ can be earned a number of different ways, like watching videos, listening to music, answering daily questions, inviting friends to join, buying your favorite brands, and with “FWB;)”, Lockerz’ social commerce feature.

PTZ are then used to lower the prices of merchandise in the Lockerz Boutiques. The more PTZ a member earns and decides to use, the larger the discount, which can be up to 100%.

Explain FWB;) To Me

FWB;) (yes, I have to include the winky face. Sigh) is Lockerz’ social commerce platform that they introduced in October 2010. It’s a self-proclaimed “hybrid of e-commerce and social networking”, and it rewards members for interacting with one another. For instance, members are rewarded with PTZ for introducing their friends to their favorite fashion or technology brands, as well as music, videos, and more.

“FWB;) creates a mutually beneficial relationship between members, their friends, and their favorite brands and artists. Friends share favorites, and everyone benefits.”

Once you sign up to become a member of Lockerz, you will create a personal profile (Locker) in which your badges (Decalz) are showcased for friends to view. When a Lockerz friend clicks on Decalz in another member’s Locker, both members earn PTZ.

Furthermore, if a friend purchases a product or views a video in-full after clicking on Decalz, both members earn (significantly) more PTZ. As you can see, the more influential members are with their friends, the more PTZ they earn towards their own shopping experience.

Conclusion

By now you may be wondering what types of products you can use all these PTZ towards on Lockerz. Well, Lockerz has partnered with thousands of the best brands and stores in a lot of different categories, including electronics, designer gear, sports equipment, and clothing outlets.

I’m a fan of what Lockerz is doing. I really think that they do a good job of offering their members incentive to use the site, as well as give them creative ways to engage other users. It’s an interesting niche social network and I can’t wait to see other companies follow suit.

What do you think of Lockerz? Leave a comment below and we’ll discuss it!

How To Set Up A Second Hard Drive In Windows: Partitioning

A few days ago, I showed you how tophysically install a second hard drive into your system, and today we will be looking at the software side of that.

Even if you didn’t crack open the case and add in another drive, you might still want to read on if you’d like to learn about the drive management system in Windows, and whatpartitions are.

Background – Partitions, and Filesystems

I’ll be throwing around some fairly technical terms today so it’s important you have an overview of what all these terms mean.

To begin with, a partition is a block of space on a hard drive. In Windows terms, you might think of a partition as a single drive letter (like C: or D:). Windows also likes to refer to a partition as a “volume“, but they are the same thing for our purposes. A single hard drive may consist of one, or many partitions – each of which will be assigned their own drive letter in Windows. For most people, a single partition is enough – however most home computers actually have another partition, hidden from Windows, on which recovery programs are placed. If your computer has a message like “Press F2 to enter recovery mode” when you turn it on, chances are you have a secret partition. Some people like to partition their drive so that Windows runs from a small section of the disk, with the data stored on an entirely separate partition – this means that re-installing Windows won’t overwrite your data. In other cases, a hard drive is partitioned in order to allow multiple operating systems to be installed at the same time – on booting the computer, you can then choose which partition you will boot from.

A Filesystem is the particular method by which data is stored on that partition. Which filesystem to choose has been known to cause violent arguments among many geeks, but suffice to say Windows XP used FAT32, Windows 7 uses NTFS, and Linux and Macs use something different entirely. Each filesystem has limitations and advantages, but for our purposes it is useful to know just that:

(a) If you’re planning on dealing with large files (like 4+ GB movies, etc.) you should use NTFS.

(b) If you want to swap drives between systems, you should use FAT32 as Mac OS X cannot write to NTFS without additional software, but you won’t be able to deal with large files.

If you’ve installed a second drive into your Windows machine, I suggest you use NTFS. To make matters more difficult though, a lot of drives come pre-formatted as FAT32 – grrr, what a headache!

Partitioning and Formatting Your Drive in Windows

Launch the disk management app by clicking Start, and typing in diskmgmt.msc – click the application that pops up in the search results. You should see a screen similar to this:

The top half of the display shows what partitions currently exist. The bottom half displays the physical devices – the drives – in your computer. In this case, I have a single 64 GB NTFS partition, which is my C: drive where Windows is currently installed. Beneath it, we have my new 50 GB drive, shown in black because it is currently all free space. Your setup may different though – Windows 7 often creates a 100 MB hidden partiton called “System Reserved” for recovery options, for instance. Note, if you drive came preformatted as a FAT32 partition, Windows may have already assigned a drive letter to it. Make sure you identify exactly which is the new disk.

You can perform various operations on the partition, or the empty space, by right-clicking on it.

If you have an existing FAT32 partition you want to get rid of (be very sure this is the new second drive and not something else), then simply right-click on the existing volume and choose either Format or Delete Volume. Choose Format if you’d simply like to make it into a fresh NTFS partition instead of FAT32. Choose Delete Volume if you’d like to make more than one partition on the drive – for example, one for music and one for movies. You can also choose Change Drive Letter and Paths if you’d just like to change the letter that Windows has automatically assigned it.

Now, having deleted your existing partition or if there wasn’t one to start with, we can go about creating a new one. Right-click on the black empty space to create a new partition by choosingNew Simple Volume.

You’ll be greeted by a standard wizard opening screen, and after clicking Next, you can choose how large you partition will be. 1 GB is roughly 1000 MB. The default setting will already be the maximum size, but in this case I’m going to split the drive into two 25 GB partitions (25000 MB) to store different kinds of data.

On the next screen, you can assign it a drive letter. Choose NTFS as the format and give it a suitable name so you can identify the drive. You can then repeat the process by clicking on the remaining Unallocated free space. If it’s the last partition you are making, just leave the size option at the default to use all remaining space. Now you should have some more drives, so check Computer from the Start Menu to see:

I hope you’ve learnt a little about disks and partitions today. They might seem scary and somewhat high level at first, but in reality they’re quite simple. So long as you are careful about what you’re deleting, managing your own disks and partitions is a lot more rewarding than simply taking the options that the manufacturers give to you.

There are also some alternatives to the built in Drive Management application that you might want to consider – like the Free Partition Manager, or Paragon suite of tools.

Most Common & Dangerous Passwords You Better Avoid

source: zonealarm