English 420, Business Writing

Our group spent the past week finalizing our White Paper presentation and creating the paper itself. The presentation presented several challenges. When we opened up PowerPoint, for some reason the slides would blend together as you went throughout the show. This may have been because we used a background from PowerPoint 2007, even though we saved in a 2003 format. Fortunately, we made a handout which helped show changes we could make to the organizational structure. Since I have always been told you should never read off the PowerPoint, this made it difficult to remember what else I needed to elaborate on during the presentation. We were able to show the presentation using the notes view, however it was almost too small to read. Unfortunately this was the only view that did not layer each slide on top of one another.

We also ran into problems with the Internet, since CCO was down when we tried to log in for the presentation and our Youtube clip would not load fast enough for us to cue it up before the presentation. In the future, it probably would have been beneficial to go to the lab prior to class and make sure all of our technology worked. Not having as much experience with Mac definitely hurt, since we created the PowerPoint using Windows.

In addition to preparing for the presentation, I was responsible for finalizing our White Paper. One of the only major changes I added was discussing how Knight Corporation should go about recruiting. This meant determining a plan of which universities to recruit from and then developing a structured interview process for all of their hires. I was able to tie in some of the work from a Human Resource Management class to determine the most valid selection techniques. Selection techniques are given values ranging from 0 to 1 based on how valid it is, or how accurately it predicts job performance. Cognitive ability tests and work samples are the most valid and can predict successful job performance about 36% of the time.