It’s not a new story, but more and more regions are moving away from printing and delivering a telephone book to everyone, every year. In Canada, the list includes
Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Ottawa-Gatineau, Montreal, Quebec City, and Winnipeg, all of which will supply a telephone book only upon request. In many cases, one can probably expect that the editions to only be updated biannually, which makes sense when the distribution has suddenly dropped to 0.1% of what it was previously.

Jian Ghomeshi’s Q on CBC is running with guest hosts during the summer, and the August 3^rd show was hosted by Terry O’Reilly of Age of Persuasion fame. (listen online) The first 20 minutes are Terry’s exploration of the Old Spice campaign with Isaiah Mustafa that’s getting a lot of press after going viral and running a hugely successful real-time social media dialogue with their spokesperson.. Amid the interviews, Terry talks with the pair responsible for the creative on this project and considers how the campaign is out of character for parent company P&G — the whole segment is worth a listen.

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.