The company’s working on a formula that can help them predict who’s most likely to resign.

The formula, which is still being tested and kept secret, uses data from performance reviews, surveys and pay and performance histories to identify employees who are likely to quit in the near future, the Wall Street Journal reports.

Presumably, they’ll take what they find and look for ways to convince those employees to stay.

Google’s had some retention issues lately, as several top employees have left the company. But is designing an equation to identify potential quitters the answer, or is it a needlessly complicated technical solution for an age-old personnel problem?

Some folks think it’s the latter. “They need to come up with ways to keep people engaged,” career consultant Valerie Frederickson was quoted as saying in the WSJ article. “If Google was doing this enough, they wouldn’t be losing all these people.”

Sounds like the general advice every company needs to follow.

That’s a question the Justice Department is currently trying to answer. The agency is reportedly looking at the hiring practices of several of the country’s largest tech firms.

According to people familiar with the investigation, the question is whether companies such as Apple, Google and Yahoo have made an agreement not to recruit each other’s employees, the New York Times reports.

If so, they may be violating antitrust laws.

The investigation’s still in its early stages, so it’s hard to say what the Justice Department will find.

The bottom line for employers, though: It’s smart to avoid both “stealing” other companies’ employees in some cases (when a non-compete’s been signed, for example) and making an agreement not to do so.

It’s the latest recruiting fad: weird, random questions that have nothing to do with the job (and often, nothing to do with much of anything at all). Google is famous for it. But does that make it a good idea?

There’s some interesting anecdotal evidence about the negative effects of these quirky tactics in this blog post here. There are some comments from job seekers about how questions like “How would you design a bike for the visually impaired?” and “How would you determine the weight of a Boeing 747?” let them know pretty quickly the job wasn’t for them.

A better way?

Interviewers can still try to avoid canned responses to questions candidates are expecting while still not straying too far from reality. There are plenty of uncommon questions that are still job-related. For example, if you’re interviewing for a management position, ask the candidate about a time her or she had to fire someone, or do some other difficult deed.

Also, asking how someone would handle a slightly far-fetched, but not out of the question, workplace scenario can let you know how people think on their feet.

But what do you think? Have you used these new interviewing tactics? Does it work? Let us know in the comments section.

When you post something to a job board, people will also be able to find it through general search engines. But there are a lot of results to compete with, so you’ll need to word the job title and description to show up in the most popular searches.

What are people searching for? You can find out by using SEO Book, a keyword research tool. Type a phrase in the search box, click submit, and you get an estimate how many people are searching for that phrase each day.

How to use it

For example, if you’re looking to hire a CPA, you might including that acronym in the job title. That will help people know right away what they need to apply – but it won’t help them find it on a search engine. According to SEO Book, the phrase “accounting jobs” gets 245 searches a day, whereas “CPA jobs” only gets 9.

So a good job title will include the former phrase to help it show up on more searches. Something like “Staff Accountant – CPA – Accounting Job” is informative, while also optimized for search results.

Read more about search-engine optimized job listings here.