Hiring the right person for a given job can be a bit of a craps shoot for many business owners — and for some HR managers as well. It seems obvious that the most important things you want to answer are whether they can do the job and whether they fit into your team. But those are not paramount.

Guessing again? Integrity, intelligence, suitability to your “fast-paced environment”, expertise, ambition, work ethic… all are plausible guesses about what the most important factor might be in a potential hire. And certainly, most of these are important factors, but none of them are critical for the interview. I’m assuming, of course, that you aren’t going to make people fill out some inane aptitude test or issue some irrelevant quiz about what kind of tree they’d most like to be.

Sometimes an ad can be so bad, it’s good — so over-the-top that it just does the trick in spite of itself. And whatever else it may be, it’s memorable. I thought about that as I watched an ad for Cullman Liquidation Center.

Yes, it’s a real business, with the T-shirts to prove it. You can check out the back-story on the making of the commercial as well. And to covers the basics: “Be there, say something.”

In my locale, everyone knows about and remembers Nick Hill and his campy furniture commercials. (He’s a local advertising legend, who would talk to a station and say things like, “Remember that spot we did in the fall of ‘82?”) And if everyone knows, then you could certainly argue that it’s working, couldn’t you?

A few weeks ago, nobody who wasn’t living literally in the shadow of a volcano was giving much thought to the impact that a volcanic eruption could have on their lives. Of course, that was before the volcano-nobody-could-pronounce erupted in Iceland, shutting down air traffic in Europe for several days. Would-be travelers were faced with a choice between sitting tight in London (or wherever) and reading a book or sightseeing, or else hopping a train to race south and attempt to fly out of a different airport. For most travelers, it was a relatively minor inconvenience and perhaps a bit of unplanned expense. For the airlines, it would certainly have had a much bigger impact.