When preparing to interview a job candidate, you probably think about which questions to ask — as you should — but what about which questions (and behaviors) to avoid? 

A new survey of 1,500 Americans determined the biggest red flags for job seekers when meeting potential employers. Here are the top results:

• “Not disclosing salary” (38%)
• “Constantly rescheduling the interview” (25%)
• “Too many personal or irrelevant questions” (25%)

Other red flags include the hiring manager disrespecting colleagues, or requiring “mandatory” overtime and “free work” as a trial. To make sure you aren’t losing any great hires, check out business.com’s guide to initial phone screens.

Career Forward: Ex-Pepsi and Nike execs’ professional advice

LaCroix: How Wisconsin brand led the fizzy revolution

American Fiction: Film explores authenticity vs. commerce

(Source: Scribner)

Grace Puma and Christiana Smith Shi, co-authors of Career Forward: Strategies From Women Who’ve Made It, have a suggestion for young women: ask not what they can do for their company — ask what they can do for themselves.

It might be surprising advice from two former Fortune 500 execs: Puma was COO of PepsiCo and Smith Shi was the president of Nike’s consumer direct division. They spoke with b. about the importance of prioritizing a career over any one job.

Can you expand on the idea of thinking of yourself as a “growth stock”? 

Puma: I think it’s been a very powerful tool in our careers. When you think about a growth stock company, it comes from investment in the right things. It comes from being able to have consistent top performance or contribution back to your shareholders. It comes from innovation, and it comes from taking some degree of risk … For me, that was working in different industries. That didn’t just happen. Strategically, I learned valuable things in terms of, how do you maneuver different cultures? How do you learn different practices? How do you work in very different businesses, from consumer products to technology to an airline? Whatever it is for you, it’s important to think, “How do I grow?”

Smith Shi: If you’re performing, if people see you delivering in your current role, if people see you interested in trying new things, they will invest their time in you. That’s how you get mentors, because they want to put their time where they’re going to get a good return.

b.: How does Career Forward advise women to strategize around inevitable office politics? People who don’t necessarily deliver, but they appear to get more recognition because they’ve formed relationships with the “right” people?

Smith Shi: We call those kinds of people — and there are women and men like this — we call them “shiny pennies.” … When I was working with a shiny penny, we were doing a project together, and he was getting a lot of the limelight, but I was doing a lot of the work. What I realized was, I needed to up my game in terms of how I was contributing to the discussions in the room. That was good for my career for me to learn that. Better early than later. Eventually, he flamed out because he didn’t deliver. When it comes down to it, you either put numbers on the board or you don’t. Some of it is a little bit of a waiting game — but learning while you wait.

b.: You start out by talking about how you’d like to impart ideas to younger generations. How do you reconcile the long-term career strategy that worked for you two with the current mentality you see on TikTok?

Smith Shi: The No. 1 loyalty you should have is to yourself and to your potential. I think that fits very well with the mindset that you’re talking about. We’re not saying, “Don’t be supportive of your company.” We’re not saying, “Don’t do the right things for your employer.” We are saying that you are in charge of your career, and you’re going to have to do the right thing [for yourself] sometimes, even if it’s hard.

This interview has been edited for length. Read the full Q&A at business.com.

When it comes to taking care of your employees, you should be doing it with gusto.

And thanks to Gusto’s HR software, you can! It centralizes helpful features, allowing you to manage your payroll and administer employee benefits in one place, as well as track professional development progress and extend your employees the growth opportunities they want. Look to the future, too, with hiring and onboarding tools that make it easy to select the right candidate and grow your team with purpose.

See the difference that a comprehensive HR management software can make in your business, when you sign up for Gusto today.

(Source: Shutterstock)

LaCroix became a major component of the mid-2010s millennial lifestyle, right alongside avocado toast and renting instead of owning. Circa 2015, health-conscious influencers were hashtagging the brand, causing a decline in soda sales; Vox called LaCroix “methadone for the soda addict.”

But the essenced sparkling water has actually been around since 1981.

No, LaCroix doesn’t come from France. It doesn’t even come from California (where the brand was bougie-fied). It’s originally from a family-owned beer brewery in Wisconsin — the very name is a portmanteau of Wisconsin’s city of La Crosse and the St. Croix River. For LaCroix’s first three decades, the primary audience was Midwestern moms.

When essenced seltzer’s time came on the national stage, LaCroix had built-in scalability — a brewery producing sparkling water made a lot of economic sense. This allowed the company to meet new audiences head-on. It also benefited from visually distinctive cans (pastel splashes that went against virtually every rule of graphic design), which Alchemy Brand Group created in 2002 as the “anti-Perrier.”

So what do you get when you take one part regional loyalty, one part scalability, and one part inimitable design? Annual sales of $3.72 billion and growing.

(Source: Orion Pictures)

The novel is an art form, but publishing is a business. Trying to strike the right balance can be treacherous, as the Oscar-nominated satirical film American Fiction explores.

Novelist Thelonious “Monk” Ellison (Jeffrey Wright) is respected in the niche world of academia. Yet, to his agent’s disappointment, his books aren’t flying off the shelves like Sintara Golden’s (Issa Rae) novel We’s Lives in Da Ghetto, which Monk feels panders to racial stereotypes. By crafting his own novel mocking such clichés, Monk inadvertently creates his biggest hit.

“It’s the most lucrative joke you’ve ever told,” his agent boasts, making an analogy using three Johnnie Walker bottles — red ($24), black ($50), and blue ($160). “Fewer people buy the blue because it’s expensive. At the end of the day, most people just want to get drunk.”

Although Monk at first laments that his own bestseller is integrity-destroying trash, he begrudgingly accepts that lowbrow and highbrow have unique markets serving different purposes. There’s space on the shelf for both.

Business leaders shouldn’t traffic in offensive stereotypes, of course, but like Monk, they can produce both “red” and “blue” products or services without compromising their core mission. In some lucky cases, “red” even leads curious consumers — or readers — to “blue” after all.

Written by Rachel Brodsky, Dan Ketchum, and Antonio Ferme. Comic by John McNamee.