It’s no secret the impact great talent can have on driving your company to success. But when it comes to interviewing candidates, how do you really weed out the pretenders from the true contenders? Sure, you can go through the list of conventional interview questions — “Where do you see yourself in 5 years?” or “What are your strengths and weaknesses?” — but as these examples show, in order to truly find the perfect fit for your team, you’re going to have to dig a little deeper. And that means asking unexpected questions to get candidates off their scripts.

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Memory can be a playful thing. It collects minute details from childhood events, yet leaves us wondering where we left our keys.

There are several types of memories, and the brain has a unique way of forgetting each kind. Psychologists have classified various ways by which we forget, and biologists have studied forgetting mechanisms at the cellular level.

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You’re a few weeks or months away from graduation, and you’ve got a decision to make: Jump into an awesome 9-to-5 job or take that project you’ve been working on for the last two years and turn it into a business. The decision isn’t easy.

Ambitious parents are used to spending money on extra tuition. Weekly French lessons from a heavily perfumed chain-smoker were the bane of my early years. My poor brother was unwillingly coerced into elocution. There are lots of arguments against this approach, of course. But in a week that four-in-10 British five-year-olds missed out on their first choice of primary school, many have come to regard after-school lessons as essential to getting ahead in life. Mandarin classes, music lessons, remedial maths – you name it. The list, like the bill, goes on.

Image: Children as young as five are dispatched to bootcamps, where they learn how to develop business ideas and raise funding from grown-up investors Photo: Alamy 

You know the value of hiring interns: They should make your life easier. They should own responsibilities--small, medium, and large--like any one else at your startup. They should be a part of your team, and you should value their opinions.

When you’re part of a small team, every person counts, your interns included. When you hire the right interns you might end up growing your batch of promising entry-level employees.

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As anyone who has watched an episode of Hoarders knows, holding on to things (especially fossilized cat skeletons) is almost never about the actual thing. There is usually a strong emotional or psychological undercurrent to all that disorder. So it makes sense that when Natalie Schrier, president of New York City-based organization company Cut the Clutter, enters a space, she's doing way more than just finding a place for her clients' stuff.

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There are over 13,000 Starbucks in the U.S. In cities like New York, where there are over 100 locations in Midtown Manhattan alone, it feels like there's one on every block. So it isn’t exactly easy to start an independent cafe that can compete. Depending on location, startup costs for a storefront space can be a few hundred thousand dollars or more. But a Swedish design firm hopes to make it possible for young people with small budgets to start their own mini coffee shop--with a bike-driven, solar-powered mobile cafe.

Image: Could this mobile coffee cart brand challenge the dominance of Starbucks? 

Young professionals, with an entrepreneurial mindset, like us, should take advantage of traditional business management tools as tactics in our career planning strategy. I believe professionals should start implementing a “business management” framework to assess their career goals and define objectives with one clear end in mind: a tailored resume that highlights your top talent potential.

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Finding creative ways to get ahead of your competition for jobs is vital because at the moment it is an employer’s market. Add to that that college students have it even tougher because they have no experience and so have to work harder to stand out. That is why adding a visual element to your resume is a great idea. The HR staff have to look at resumes all day and sooner or later they are going to start blending into one big mess of words. That is why it is important to be more visual in order to stand out.

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With a Chinese-language site and WeChat integration, professional social network LinkedIn is going after China’s young up-and-comers. Many people were skeptical that a Western social network would be allowed over the country’s Great Firewall, but LinkedIn so far has been able to stay on the censors’ good side. “LinkedIn and maybe Snapchat are the only ones that can get regulatory approval here in China,” said Youku CEO Victor Koo in response to an audience question at last week’s China 2.0 forum. The event at Beijing’s Peking University also brought Derek Shen, the newly appointed president of LinkedIn China, to the stage.

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When something seems too good to be true, it usually is. And management techniques, practices, and strategies are no different. When you read a business book or attend a presentation on a particular management practice, it is a good habit to explicitly ask, “What might it not be good for?” When might it not work; what could be its drawbacks? If the presenter’s answer is “there are none,” a healthy dose of skepticism is warranted.

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GE is often highlighted as an organization that develops some of the most effective leaders. Most companies have a version of the talent-review system we use at GE. But judging from what I hear from managers of companies that visit us to benchmark our system, the difference between our approach and theirs does not lie in forms, rankings, tools, or technologies. It lies in the intensity of the discussion about performance and values. The debate, the dialogue, and the time taken to have an exhaustive view of an individual − evaluating them based on both what they accomplish and how they lead − are far more important than any of the mechanics. The heart of our system has always been about the enormous time commitment the organization and the leadership devote to the conversation about people.

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The rise of corporate venture capital investors, whether at the seed-stage, in the largest financings or into the billion-dollar valuation club, has been reshaping the VC ecosystem as of late. And while some VCs including Fred Wilson have been critical of corporate venture units, others have syndicated dozens of deals with corporate venture arms in just the past few years alone.

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WATERLOO — A $200-million venture capital fund focused on Waterloo Region startups will be officially unveiled soon by two well-known players in the technology sector.

Tim Ellis, outgoing chief executive officer of the Accelerator Centre in Waterloo, has partnered with Michael Wekerle, a colourful Bay Street financier who formerly was the senior trader at GMP Securities. GMP is the firm that helped take Research In Motion, now BlackBerry, public in 1997. About a year ago Wekerle started an investment bank called Difference Capital.

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When the machines take over, much will change. But perhaps not the exquisite frustrations of a halting philosophical debate.

Researchers at Cornell University’s Creative Machines Lab have demonstrated this by putting two artificially intelligent avatars in conversation with one another. The avatars, called Cleverbots, are sophisticated versions of the classic Eliza program, developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the 1960s.

CHICAGO, April 17, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- Today Healthbox announces it has closed $7 million in funding to expand on its accelerator model and launch three new business verticals that will continue to drive actionable innovation through collaboration between entrepreneurs and the healthcare industry.

This is a bold vision for a healthcare accelerator. Healthbox closed the $7 million from a collaborative group of leading healthcare organizations to form Healthbox Global Partners, LLC, representing the common need to find and implement transformative solutions that will improve health outcomes.

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Just two episodes in, Mike Judge’s tech-savvy sitcom Silicon Valley is already one of the funniest shows on TV, with a pitch-perfect cast delivering wit, bro humor and satire in a single, easy-to-operate unit. A lot of this comedic magic happens inside the “incubator,” where T.J. Miller’s Erlich Bachmann houses fellow coders and programmers for a percentage of their development profits, and HBO is giving us an all-access look inside the so-called “hacker hostel,” with the show’s stars joking their way through the electronics-stuffed home. I would easily live in this place, assuming I wouldn’t need to know how to actually do anything necessary to live there.

FORTUNE -- There is no shortage of evidence testifying to the value of crowdfunding for those seeking to finance a new product idea, company, or even personal need. Just this month, Kickstarter-born Oculus VR was snatched up by Facebook for $2 billion. Smartwatch-maker Pebble sold more than 400,000 of its crowdfunded smartwatches last year. And in March, Kickstarter surpassed $1 billion in pledges made.

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If you have a business website, you’ve probably already heard, and are worried, about the Heartbleed Bug. Simply put, the Heartbleed Bug is a flaw in the SSL certificate used by some websites. That flaw might allow passwords, credit card numbers and other data to be leaked as a result.

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On the surface, the first quarter venture capital funding report by National Venture Capital Association and PriceWaterhouseCoopers looks like another downward trend for venture capital deal flow in the life science sector. But if you dig a little deeper there are some positive trends too.

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