The latest employment indicators show that companies will be slow to hire in Q4, even as their profit outlook improves. Part of the reason for this is economic uncertainty among employers; however, on the upside, it’s also a reaction to the fact that companies have found ways to do more with less, according to this Wall Street Journal article.

As employers seek to maintain momentum in the uncertain months ahead, they will need to rely on the next generation of leaders to drive their companies forward – whether in the form of new hires or current employees taking on new responsibilities.

As you help organizations seek out these leaders, what qualities should you look for in candidates and current employees? The Hiring Site wants to put together a comprehensive list of the top qualities recruiters and hiring managers should look for in identifying leaders, and we’re asking you to share your own tried-and-true practices.

Share your thoughts with us, and you could win a new Kindle™ Wireless Reading Device.

How to enter:
Simply answer this question – “What quality or characteristic do you look for – above all else – when looking for your organization’s next leader, and why?” – in the comments section below, and you’ll automatically be entered to win a brand new Kindle™.

Contest details:
Entries will be accepted from 12 a.m. CST on Monday, November 2, 2009 until 11:59 p.m. CST on Friday, November 6, 2009.  Each account may only submit one answer for consideration; subsequent entries will not be considered. Spam responses will not be considered. The winner will be picked at random and notified via e-mail the week of November 11, 2009. Please read the full list of official contest rules and regulations.

In the end, however, everyone came away a winner: Out of over 600 entries, we compiled for you a comprehensive list of the best of the best interview questions that readers swear by - from the old standbys, to some new classics, to the downright bizarre - in a two-part series. 

This first part of this series features the top 10 interview questions that stood out for us here on THS as both original and purposeful, followed by submitters’ comments.

1. What does a company owe its employees? “The interviewer learns more about what true expectations a candidate has for a company.”
2. What Web sites do you visit on a regular basis? “The answer to this question tells me if the applicant is aware of industry-related websites and keeps up with industry trends and news and is therefore more qualified for the position.”
3. If you were to be hired, what do you think would be a reason you may not stay in this position or with the company? “The answers to this question may really surprise you. I.e. ‘I’d leave for more money,’ or ‘If I didn’t like my co-worker,’ or ‘we’re trying to move back to my hometown.’ Red flags for sure.”
4. What risks did you take in your last position? “I like this question because it lets me know what I can expect from a candidate. Are they willing to step outside the box?”
5.  If an employee went about a task in a way which clearly contradicted your instruction, yet was highly successful. How would you handle it? “When hiring for a management position I like to ask a candidate [this question]. You can gauge a lot about their management style by how they handle the situation and what they focus on in this scenario.”
6. Tell me what your ‘ideal’ work day/week would consist of. “I want the candidate to convey what’s important in terms of applied work time; processing time; down time, if any.”
7. Things don’t always go the way we’d like; sometimes we cannot deliver on a promised deadline. What is the best way to deliver a negative message to your customer? “This can give you insight to how the candidate thinks, and their honesty and integrity.”
8. Tell me when you used your sense of humor to diffuse a situation. “Most large corporations and many small ones feel that a sense of humor is not needed and it is not encouraged. We firmly believe that a happy employee is a productive one.”
9. What was the most useful criticism you ever received, and who was it from? “You learn what kind of feedback the person is receiving so you can determine their performance. It gives you insight into their weaknesses that others view as well.”
10. What sorts of trends do you think affect our business?  “Good to see if they understand business influences and if they’ve spent time trying to learn about our industry.”

Stay tuned for Part II: The Best of the Rest…

As the economy stabilizes, you will likely need to increase headcount. To help ensure you find the best employees for your upcoming business needs, The Hiring Site is putting together a comprehensive list of great interview questions to ask.  And we want your input…

How to enter:

Simply tell us your favorite interview question to ask (or the best interview question you’ve ever heard someone else ask) – and why you like it – in the comments section below, and you’ll be entered to win a brand new flip video camera.

Contest details:
Entries will be accepted from 12 a.m. CST on Monday, October 5, 2009 until 11:59 p.m. CST on Friday, October 9, 2009.  Each account may only submit one answer for consideration; subsequent entries will not be considered. Spam responses will not be considered. The winner will be picked at random and notified via e-mail the week of October 12, 2009. Please read the full list of official contest rules and regulations.

While the information presented was really powerful, the one line that stuck with me all these years was something one of the nutritionists said.  She said, “waste or waist,” meaning leftover food can either be wasted or go straight to your waist. Now choose the lesser of the two evils.

Well, “waste or waist” may be applicable for food, but at CareerBuilder, we hate to waste anything. And to my joyful surprise, when I arrived at work today I found 10 pristine CareerBuilder Jack in the Boxes left behind in a dark storage room.

You may not know this, but Jack took home the gold medal in the Special Promotions category of the 2008 BMA Tower Awards. So, needless to say, he’s kind of a big deal, and finding this guy robbed of all of his glory in a dark storage closet was kind of like finding a few extra Emmy statuettes carelessly tossed into the laundry hamper.  (Relatively speaking, the Jack in the Boxes are probably more akin to statuettes from the Daytime Emmy’s, but still…) That said, here’s my challenge to you: Help me find this award-winning guy a good home.

What does this mean for you? Well, if you want to be a proud owner of the award winning Jack, simply become a fan of our employer Facebook page, CareerBuilder for Employers AND leave a comment on our Facebook Wall about a topic you’d like us to discuss on Facebook. We’ll choose 10 lucky new followers at random to win. This offer expires Monday September 28 at 5 pm CST. Don’t let our lonely Jacks go to waste!

Facebook fans have the opportunity to receive exclusive info and promotions, as well as interact with fellow fans (and us of course!).

• Have you encouraged your employees to learn a new skill or picked one up yourself?
• Have you forged stronger relationships with co-workers, or met new co-workers?
• Are you finding better ways to prioritize or manage your work/life balance?
• Have you made a professional or personal discovery?
• Has your life has changed for the better in any other ways?

Write us a comment and share your survivor story by Friday, July 10, and five of you lucky readers will be randomly picked to receive your very own CareerBuilder Koala T-shirt. Oh, did we mention it’s FREE?

Post your comment by Friday, July 10 for a chance to score this tee:

Eager to develop a deeper relationship with our beloved coffee-drinking, eucalyptus-munching friend? Don’t forget, you can become a friend of the CareerBuilder Koala on Facebook.

You’ve likely heard a million times that companies are “doing more with less.” But as the consequences of that fall directly on a company’s employees, what does that mean for them? Workers are taking on more responsibility or new duties, working harder and longer hours, and likely not getting paid more for their work.

If you are pitching in to help your company survive the recession with less staff, how are you and your employees surviving? What are the positives that have come out of your world, post-layoffs?

• Have you encouraged your employees to learn a new skill or picked one up yourself?
• Have you forged stronger relationships with co-workers, or met new co-workers?
• Are you finding better ways to prioritize or manage your work/life balance?
• Have you made a professional or personal discovery?
• Has your life has changed for the better in any other ways?

Write us a comment and share your survivor story — and five of you will be randomly picked to receive your very own CareerBuilder Koala T-shirt. Oh, did we mention it’s FREE?

Post your comment by Friday, July 10 for a chance to score this tee:

Eager to develop a deeper relationship with our beloved coffee-drinking, eucalyptus-munching friend? Don’t forget, you can become a friend of the CareerBuilder Koala on Facebook or purchase your own Koala gear.

Even if you have no interest in voting, it’s worth checking out.  At the very least, you’ll get a cringe kick out of watching some of these submissions; however, you might also gain a little insight into what makes passive job seekers run to – and from - certain jobs and companies.  (They say every joke has its grain of truth after all…)

Make sure to cast your vote by April 7 at 4:59pm ET!  We’ll announce the winner here on The Hiring Site on April 21st.

Well, we’ve made our favorite koala (Is he British? Is he Australian? We don’t really know) into a minor celebrity and put his likeness on some limited-edition T-shirts. This is where you come in.

We want to know what you’re doing in the face of our current recession. There’s been a heap of negativity in the media lately, and we (as we suspect you do too) want to hear about the good things going on in businesses across the nation and around the world. Do you have a story to share about something your business has learned recently? A way that you’ve become more innovative? A great thing you’re doing to lift employee morale?

Share in the comments section below and tell us about it. What’s in it for you, you ask? Possibly one of these:

We will accept comments through Friday, Feb. 27th – and we’ll randomly pick 10 winners to score a free T-shirt.

Eager to develop a deeper relationship with our beloved coffee-drinking, eucalyptus-munching friend? Become a friend of the CareerBuilder Koala on Facebook or purchase your own Koala gear.

CareerBuilder.com sincerely thanks all of our participants for sharing your clever ideas with us. We can’t wait to see what this year’s contest brings! Visit BuildMyDreamTeam.com in March for more details.

The dish: Announcing a sneak peek into CareerBuilder.com’s new Applicant Explorer tool. Within seconds, a snapshot of information available on the Web appears next to your current favorite candidate’s resume. You immediately see the most useful and valuable information out there about that candidate, by doing less work than you are today.

The gist: Now, you can get a comprehensive collection of a candidate’s Web footprint from within CareerBuilder.com’s Resume Database.  This complimentary (yes, we said FREE) feature gives you access to relevant information about the candidate you’re courting, generated from a variety of sources:

• Social networking sites
• Professional and personal blogs
• Personal and corporate Web sites
• Press releases
• Discussion and forum postings
• Articles and news stories published online

Also known as: The deep-dish pizza of CareerBuilder.com Free Tools. Saucy, multi-layered, and oozing with all kinds of tasty toppings.

Why? Applicant Explorer gives you information about a candidate well beyond his or her resume. Take screening to a new level by uncovering that public yet hard-to-find information about candidates — in less time than it takes you to say “Job Offer.” You will no longer be tempted to throw that computer out the window. You may even – dare we say it – start enjoying your candidate searches.

How to get it: If you’re a subscriber to our Resume Database, you already have access — you just need to activate it.

Simple steps to access:

1. A user with manager rights on your CareerBuilder.com account must log in initially to activate your Applicant Explorer functionality.
2. Go to “My CareerBuilder and select “My Accounts” under “My Account Info.”
3. Select “Account Users” and then check the Applicant Explorer check box.
4. To start getting results, simply click into a resume. To the left of the resume, you will see Applicant Explorer details. From there, click into the details for deeper results.
5. Results are divided into “matched results” and “expanded results.” Matched results include professional and social networking sites. Expanded results include forums, personal or company blogs, and work done for previous companies.

Pairs best with: CareerBuilder.com Resume Database access, an open mind, and a desire for a new and more intelligent way to search.

Why job seekers love it: Job seekers are evolving along with employers and utilizing new tools every day to connect in the online space. As candidates leave their mark in various online places, they continue to define and refine their personal brand. A candidate’s professional image is a part of that personal brand, and Applicant Explorer is allowing these two worlds to more easily meet, for the first time.

Why you need it: Applicant Explorer isn’t about digging for dirt on candidates. It is, rather, about finding out what candidates are truly like, and getting a well-rounded picture of the person you may hire. A traditional resume only gives you a limited amount of info; much of what you really want to know involves what’s not on that single-page document.

Seeking out a mechanical engineer? Forums that a candidate has participated in are pulled into search results, so you can check out an in-depth industry question they may have asked, or read their thoughtful answer to someone else. Get an idea of a candidate’s interests and knowledge outside of the formal interview setting.

Satisfy your appetite: Start getting real and practical results that you may be missing from a resume.
Hiring a designer? Applicant Explorer allows you to quickly and easily see past projects and examples of a candidate’s work to get a sense of that candidate’s talent beyond what he or she was able to send you.

Big tip: Applicant Explorer reflects the direction toward which job seeker/employer behavior is moving, even if many of us don’t see it clearly quite yet. This is your chance to be a part of that change.