gcapone, Author at Palladian Career Resources

Branding With Your Email Address

The first thing a hiring manager will see when you send an email is your name. Few people think about how they are marketing themselves with their name, but there are pitfalls to avoid.

I’m not suggesting you change your identification to something other than your name. On the contrary, job seekers should identify themselves by name. Surprisingly, a number don’t. Typically, this is a result of using a family member’s email address. The other person’s email has their name in the address, and it identifies them at the top of the email. Sending an email with someone else’s email can be confusing for a hiring manager.

Many hiring managers receive dozens or hundreds of emails each day. You can’t expect a hiring manager to remember that emails from “Jane Doe” and the address janedoe @ gmail . com, are really messages from “John Doe.” Even worse, if you use an email without full names, remembering and identifying who you are can prove difficult.

For example, I received a resume of a job seeker recently who used a family email address. The email name was something like “John and Jane,” and the email address was johnandjane @ gmail . com. The job seeker had sent his resume a week or two ago, and sent me a follow up email. The follow up email was signed “John.”

Nowhere in the email was the candidate’s last name. The only way I could find the candidate in my database was to search on the email address field. This isn’t impossible, and it really isn’t all that difficult. It is more time consuming than looking up the candidate by last name. Most databases are set up to make looking up a name fast. There are so many fields to search on in a job seeker's record, looking up candidates on other criteria is slower. So, the candidate’s email ended up focusing my attention entirely on the fact that he doesn’t have his own email.

How to Change Your Email and Email Name

For your job search, you should have a personal email address with your name. This should have your last name and either your first name or first initial. It is easy to get a free email account. Just go to Google and sign up for gmail.

Once your email is set up, select the email name that is associated with the account. In gmail, you can go to Settings and then to Send Mail As and change the name displayed with your email address.

If you use Outlook, you can make this change in Outlook. Microsoft provides instructions at: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook/HA011507601033.aspx.

Finally, you should also set up a standard signature for your email. A signature is a block of text that is automatically placed at the bottom of each email you send. It should contain your full name and contact information – although just a phone number is usually sufficient. You want to make it easy for a hiring manager to pick up the phone.

Will This Really Help My Search?

Setting your email name, email address and creating a signature for your emails are minor details. They will not get you hired if you aren’t qualified. They also won’t cause you to be rejected by themselves. If you’re a superstar and clearly the best person for the job, you can make a lot of mistakes in your job search, and they won’t hurt. Most people are not clearly better than their competition. If this is your situation, you want to make the best impression you can every step of the way. Details like your email are easy to change. It only takes a minute or two, and then you’re good to go for the remainder of your job search.

The one way your email might have a large impact on your search is if you have something controversial as an email name. There are email addresses that are really hurting the job seekers. I’ve received emails that include made up boastful titles, such as xtreme, big and king. Others call into question whether the job seeker has a propensity for violence (just a hint here, but “gangsta,” “gunman” and “sniper” aren’t good to have in your email address). For other words (such as menace, freedom, hotrod and spartan), it’s more difficult to know how different people will interpret them. All of these words appeared actual email address of job seekers sending me a resume. The email addresses are eye catching and memorable, but they did not help the job seeker, and in a few cases, hurt their chances significantly.

Behavioral Interview Questions for Warehousing Professionals

Behavioral interviewing is common among the Fortune 500 and continues to be used by more and more companies. In retail and manufacturing, behavioral interviews are common. If you are a warehousing or distribution professional, it is very likely you will encounter behavioral interviews in your career, both in job searches and in internal interviews for promotions.

Behavioral interviewing is common among the Fortune 500, and it continues to be used by more and more companies. In retail and manufacturing, behavioral interviews are common. If you are a warehousing or distribution professional, it is very likely you will encounter behavioral interviews in your career, both in job searches and in internal interviews for promotions. Preparing for a behavioral interview is critical for you to succeed. You need to have very detailed examples from your background. Completing one or more mock interviews is another essential step.

The reason so many firms have adopted behavioral interviewing is that past performance is often the best predictor of future performance. Now, assessing past performance in a behavioral interview is not looking at overall success in a position, although this is an important component. Behavioral interviewing assesses the success of the job seeker in a variety of common situations they will face in a job. If the job seeker can demonstrate past success in each of the individual tasks, the job seeker should be able to be successful in the role.

The goal of a behavioral interview is to try to get the job seeker to describe their background in sufficient detail so the hiring manager can picture how the job seeker performs. This style of interview requires the job seeker to answer open-ended questions and tell stories. General answers will not work. To be successful, you must prepare.

The first step in preparing for a behavioral interview is to review your background and start writing some stories about your experiences. To help you think of a few stories to tell, I’ve compiled a number of common interview questions for warehousing positions:

Tell me about a time when you took over an under-performing team.
Tell me about a time when you failed to hit your distribution plan.
Tell me about a time when you were understaffed for the daily plan.
Tell me about a time when you were overstaffed for the daily plan.
Tell me about a time when you adopted new technology.
Tell me about a time when you addressed a safety issue.
Tell me about a time when you improved the productivity of a team.
Tell me about a time when you improved the quality of a team.
Tell me about a time when you had a conflict with a peer.
Tell me about a time when you dealt with a conflict between two people on your team.
Tell me about a time when you hired and trained a large group of new employees at once.
Tell me about a time when you were overstaffed and needed to downsize.
Tell me about a time when you coached someone working for you on their performance.
Tell me about a time when you missed your budget goals.
Tell me about a time when you adapted to unforeseen events in order to stay on pace to hit your budget.

This list of questions is just a starting point. There are thousands of potential questions you could be asked. Although it may seem impossible to prepare for all of them, you can prepare for the different types of questions you might encounter. For example, in the list above, there are questions about improving productivity, safety and quality, adapting staffing levels to the plan, utilizing new technology, dealing with conflict, and budge issues. This selection of topics will give you a good start and covers some of the most common interview topics for warehousing careers.

Get our book on behavioral interviewing.

Other Great Books to help you prepare for Behavioral Interviews:

Functional Resume Without Accomplishments

The functional resume I read today makes a common resume writing mistake. The resume failed to include any quantified accomplishments. We’ve found in our resume benchmarking studies roughly half of all resumes do not provide any accomplishments.

Every resume makes claims about the job seeker’s skills and abilities. For a hiring manager, there is no way to validate the claims on the resume alone. This forces hiring managers to be very skeptical when reviewing resumes for the first time. The first step to assess the job seeker’s true capability is to assess specific examples the person’s past performance. Without providing success stories, your resume will look like everyone else’s, and the hiring manager will have to assume you don’t have a successful track record. Otherwise, if you didn’t have numerous examples of accomplishment, you would have listed them.

The resume I read today had the following structure:

Summary of Qualifications
Experience
Responsibilities
Accomplishments
Education

This structure seems like it would be a chronological resume format, but the job seeker used it in a functional format. What made this a functional format was the content of the sections. The Experience section was just a job listing, with the employer, job title and dates for each position. There was nothing describing the jobs.

The Responsibilities section has one paragraph describing some of the roles the job seeker held, but it is so vague there no way to really understand what each job was. Between the job titles and the responsibilities description, we can make a guess what the scope of responsibility of the job seeker was, but it is only a guess – not something most hiring managers are going to get excited about.

The Accomplishments section should provide the core sales pitch for the job seeker. Unfortunately, this section doesn’t include any real accomplishments. The bullets are just descriptions of responsibilities. Below are a few examples of the bullets from the Accomplishments sections:

Ability to read blueprints and use standard measuring equipment.
Experience and operation of a Semi Automatic Gundrill (limited).
Specialized in component marking and packaging.
Attended courses in JIT and SPC, as well as courses for Supervisory Training.

To make a strong impression, you need to show what you did, not just what you were responsible for doing. There are lots of candidates who have had similar experiences. The job seeker who will get the job is the one who shows what they did with their responsibility and provides specific details of contributions made.

In a functional resume, it can be tempting to focus on the responsibilities and experiences in different functional areas. Your experience is important, but this is just the starting point. If you choose a functional structure, despite the warnings of my previous two articles, make sure you provide specific accomplishments. These need to show your role, scope of responsibility, actions you took and the specific, quantified results you delivered. Without all of this detail, the accomplishment will not be as impressive as it could be.

Often a smaller accomplishment that you can describe briefly while supplying clear detail of the situation is more impressive on a resume than a vague accomplishment with a greater overall impact. This is usually because the big accomplishments are difficult to explain in sufficient detail for the reader to understand what really happened. They are better suited to an interview where you can take two or three minutes to describe the accomplishment in detail.

Functional Resume Example

On Monday, I reviewed five reasons to avoid a functional resume structure. Today, let’s look at a real example of a functional resume I received recently.

The job seeker who sent me this resume worked for the federal government for more than twenty years and has worked for a couple big consulting firms for the last five years. The titles listed in the employment history section include, Consultant, Program Manager, Senior Business Analyst and Team Leader. These titles are commonly used, but are not very specific. With the functional format, there is nothing in the resume that shows what the job seeker did in each job.

The content of the resume is grouped in four functional sections:

Leadership Skills
Performance Improvement
Communications
Project Management

In addition to the functional sections, the job seeker also has sections for education and employment history.

Under each functional section is a series of bullet points designed to demonstrate the job seeker’s skill and record of accomplishments. The problem with this structure is the lack of context for any of the information. There is no way to tell what the candidate’s role was. For example, one of the bullets under leadership skills is:

Demonstrated excellent leadership skills by implementing a new strategic business model which improved efficiency by over 90% which resulted in year on year savings of $15 million

Your first reaction might be to think this is a pretty good accomplishment. Saving $15 million is usually a good accomplishment. Unfortunately, there’s nothing that shows what the job seeker did. He says he implemented a new business model. There’s nothing about developing the business model or whether the savings achieved were in department he managed. If anything, this looks like a slam dunk accomplishment anyone could do. The job seeker was given new business processes and told to roll them out to his team. The person that designed the business model and sold the organization’s leadership on adopting it is the person who really generated the savings.

A bullet under Performance Improvement also provides some nice numbers but don’t show enough detail to know what happened:

Effectively Introduced and implemented benchmark standards to a national service for the public. The outcome was an increase in customer satisfaction of over 85% within 3 months

Improving customer satisfaction by 85% is a great accomplishment. There’s a lot we don’t know about this, though. First, who were the customers? Second, what was the role of the job seeker? Third, who developed the benchmarks? Fourth, how many customers were involved in this service?

These questions are important but the bottom line question is “what did the job seeker do that was exceptional?” If all he did was rollout a set of standards to his team that were being adopt across the organization, it’s not much of an accomplishment. From the resume, we can’t tell if he did this with a very small team of only a couple people or if he was directing a department with hundreds or thousands of people under his leadership.

The key element that is missing from the resume is something to clearly show what the job seeker did. Your resume should help a hiring manager picture you doing a job. To do that, you need to describe very clearly what you did in the past. This requires being specific about what you did and what the direct results of your actions were.

Top Five Reasons to Avoid a Functional Resume

A functional resume can be effective in a few rare situations, but more often, this structure will hurt your job search chances. Job seekers like the functional format because it allows them much greater flexibility in highlighting the information they think is important. Unfortunately, using a functional resume can cause a hiring manager to eliminate you from consideration before they understand your potential.

The basic structure of a functional resume separates a job seeker’s experience from their work history. In a chronological resume, experiences and accomplishments are grouped under each job. Functional resumes break this pattern. Experiences and accomplishments are grouped under functional areas, mixing experiences from different jobs. The job seeker’s work history is then presented as a list jobs.

The functional structure makes it easy to tailor a resume to the key elements of a job. It also emphasizes significant experiences and accomplishments. This makes it a tempting choice. If you are thinking of using a functional structure, consider these five reasons to avoid a functional resume first:

1. No Context for Accomplishments

Accomplishments establish your performance track record and provide the best selling point for your potential. A job seeker who shows a clear, easy to understand and significant accomplishment in the past will help show a hiring manager what they can accomplish in the future. This makes presenting your accomplishments a critical element of your resume.

For an accomplishment to be impressive, the context of the accomplishment must be clear. This requires showing the job seeker’s role, scope of responsibility, the actions the job seeker took and the specific results delivered to the organization.

In a chronological resume, listing an accomplishment under a job provides some of this context. The job description provides the scope of responsibility and can imply some of the actions that would ordinarily be taken. A functional resume detaches the accomplishment from the job, making the scope impossible to determine.

2. Job Responsibilities Are Unclear

Understanding the job seeker’s scope of responsibilities throughout their career is important for a hiring manager to understand their performance. A functional resume often omits this information. The experience and accomplishments of the job seeker are listed throughout the functional areas. They are not tied to the jobs. The job listing is just a list of employers, job titles and dates. If the job title doesn’t make the scope of responsibilities clear, there’s no way to know what the job seeker did. Most job titles are ambiguous. Even commonly used job titles vary in their scope from company to company, and some job titles are unique to a single company. You cannot rely on a job listing to show what you did.

3. Mismatches Hiring Manager Goals

Hiring managers review resumes with specific goals in mind. The hiring manager will look for key data points – skills, details of past jobs and accomplishments. The hiring manager will also have a priority for each element. For example, the first time a resume is reviewed may only involve a simple check for the number of years of experience in a role, the education and the years of experience with a key skill. In this situation, the hiring manager is likely to read the first few lines of the resume, and then skip to the employment and education section. Because these sections are just a listing of names and dates, they won’t do much to sell the job seeker.

You want to present information in the order that a hiring manager wants to read it. This requires focusing on the hiring manager’s goals – not yours. Functional resumes turn this upside down. It encourages a job seeker to focus on what they want to promote, and can make it more difficult for the hiring manager to find the information they want to see first.

4. Implies You Are Hiding Something

Hiring managers are naturally very skeptical. They know a resume is the best sales pitch a job seeker can write, and a resume emphasizes the positives and de-emphasizes the negatives. This can lead to mistrust and doubt any time a job seeker presents information in a way that makes it difficult to decipher. Using a functional structure to obscure an element of your background will usually backfire. The uncertainty in a key detail of your experience leads to the hiring manager to assume the worst. Instead of improving your odds, you have now created a situation where the hiring manager has a significant doubt.

5. The Least Common Resume Format

Chronological resumes are the most common format used. In our resume benchmarking surveys, we found roughly two thirds of all resumes are chronological. Functional resumes are rare and offer a vastly different presentation from the typical chronological resume. Being unusual has drawbacks (implying you are hiding something), but there is an even greater problem. Hiring managers are much more familiar with assessing chronological resumes. They will feel more comfortable with a chronological resume and will assess chronological resumes more efficiently. This can lead to a hiring manager missing a key detail in your resume because they don’t know where to look. It would be great if every hiring manager read every word of every resume but this is never going to happen. Hiring managers skim resumes quickly. If they don’t know where to look for key information and skip over it as a result, they will assume you don’t have the experience or skill they want. You then get rejected. Using a chronological resume makes this process easier for the hiring manager.

When writing a resume, job seekers want to “stand out” from the competition. The key is differentiating yourself for the right reasons. Innovative, unusual or creative designs obscure the substance of a resume. It is this substance that will get you an interview and ultimately hired.

Provide a clear presentation of your experience and skills. Including several significant accomplishments demonstrating your track record of success. Package this information in a clear, easy to read structure. Although following functional structure should usually be avoided, strictly following a chronological format is not required. There are numerous hybrid variations that incorporate functional elements into a chronological resume. This can often offer the best of both structures.

Too Much Information

Should you volunteer information in an interview that will hurt your chances of getting hired?
When interviewing, it is important to be honest. Lies and fabrications will doom your chances when they are discovered. At the same time, there is information job seekers volunteer that is not essential. Often this information hurts the candidate’s chances. One example of this I have run into relates to spouses of individuals who relocate frequently. The spouse volunteers that they are likely to move again in a few years.

Should you volunteer information in an interview that will hurt your chances of getting hired?

When interviewing, it is important to be honest. Lies and fabrications will doom your chances when they are discovered. At the same time, there is information job seekers volunteer that is not essential. Often this information hurts the candidate’s chances. One example of this I have run into relates to spouses of individuals who relocate frequently. The spouse volunteers that they are likely to move again in a few years.

This is common in the military and in some corporations. There are individuals who relocate every three to five years. They know the odds are good a posting will not be permanent.

During the hiring process, a job seeker will often highlight the frequency of the relocations to explain why they are “jumpy.” Being jumpy is a term for people who do not stay in a job very long. It usually has a very negative connotation and many hiring managers will assume the job seeker was unsuccessful. This makes it important to explain why a person changed jobs. Frequent relocations due to a spouse’s career explain a jumpy track record.

Unfortunately, there is a question you are almost guaranteed to hear… How long will you be here before you relocate again? Most hiring managers want to hire people who will stay a long time. They don’t want to hire someone they know they will have to replace quickly. How you answer this question can affect your odds of getting hired significantly.

If you know you are going to relocate in the near future, you need to be honest. However, there are few people who know with certainty what is going to happen have two, three or five years down the road. You and your spouse may plan for your spouse to stay in the military for an additional ten years, and it is likely you will need to relocate a few times during that period. This isn’t a guarantee. There is a lot that can happen that can change this plan.

Your plans can change due to your decisions. Your spouse may decide to leave the military earlier than planned or you may not need to relocate when the next posting comes out. Your plans may also change due to factors outside your control. Just because your spouse wants to stay in the military, there is no guarantee this will be an option. The military grows and shrinks over time. There have been periods when it was very difficult to stay in the military because of downsizing. There is a wide range of other reasons that could also change your plans.

In the corporate world, predicting the future is even more difficult. No matter how stable a company is, there is no guarantee they will continue in their current form. Well respected companies fail and mergers can dramatically change the goals and procedures of a company. A person also has more control of their career in the private sector. Someone in the military usually cannot refuse a new assignment, but you can refuse a transfer within a company. There can be negative effects on a person’s career by doing this, but it possible to decline a move.

All of this creates uncertainty. No matter how you plan the future, it is very difficult to be certain what the future will hold several years down the road. For this reason, you should be careful when speculating about the future in the future.

When asked if you will relocate again, answer honestly: You do not have firm plans to move. You may relocate again, but you don’t know for sure. There are a lot of factors that could affect this. Right now, you are focused on building a career here.

Volunteering more information than this is unlikely to help you and it can create a false expectation with a hiring manager.

The one exception to this advice is if you know with certainty you are moving. If your spouse has accepted another position, and you know you will be moving in the near future, you really should be honest about this.

Tailor Your Cover Letter

Each time you apply for a job, you are sending an advertisement for a product, you and the work you are capable of doing, to a sales prospect, the employer. The more you can learn about your prospect, the better you can tailor your sales pitch. The key is tailoring your presentation to what is important to the prospect – not what is important to you.

Many job seekers send the same generic cover letter to every employer (or worse, fail to send any cover letter). This might work if you were the only person sending out a resume and the employer was desperate to hire. They won’t care what your sales pitch was. This isn’t the situation, though. We know there is a lot of competition for jobs. You are not going to be the only option for an employer. This makes it essential to craft the best sales pitch possible.

Gaining intelligence is an important first step. The more you can learn about the priorities and expectations of the employer, the better your chances. A hiring manager will be looking for much more than just someone who can do the job. Hiring managers have specific objectives and will prioritize skills and abilities differently. A lot of this comes from the team that is in place. If a team is extremely strong in some areas and weaker in others, the hiring manager may prioritize the areas of weaker skills in order to elevate the team’s performance in this area.

If you can learn the specifics of a hiring manager’s goals, you can tailor to them. To get this information, you need to network. You have to meet people within the company and learn details about the organization few know. The more you learn, the better your chances. Networking takes time and effort, but it works.

Once you gather the research you need to tailor your cover letter, it’s time to get writing. Your cover letter should be brief. Your goal is to make a quick positive impressive and to generate interest in reading your resume. Think of it like a car ad. The purpose of the ad isn’t to sell you a car – it is to get you visit the showroom. Your cover letter is like the ad – it needs to motivate the hiring manager to want to read your resume closely.

There are number of elements of a cover letter you should customize. First, you should have a specific statement why you are interested in the company. This shows interest and that you have taken the time to research the company. Most hiring managers will assess your resume more closely if you show you have put a lot of time into learning about their company. Second, you should tailor the skills you highlight to the specific position and needs of the company. This is where your research becomes incredibly valuable. Finally, you should include a couple accomplishments showing your past successes with the skills you highlighted. The accomplishments are the key to the presentation. They show what you could accomplish for the company and will help you stand out from your competition. The more you can tailor the accomplishments to the job, the better the impression you will make.

This may sound like you have to write a completely new cover letter for each application. It’s actually a lot easier than this. Once you develop a structure you like, you are just changing a little information. It really doesn’t take much customization to develop a really strong cover letter.

ASCII Resumes

Making a resume look pretty can be important. Unfortunately, one format will not work in every situation. You will need an ASCII version in addition to your MS Word version.

An ASCII file is a pure text file with virtually no formatting. You can’t bold, italicize, change fonts or font sizes, center or justify the test, or do anything else common in word processing programs. Think of an ASCII file as a text file similar to what an old typewriter could do. The only characters you can put in an ASCII file are the upper and lower case letters, numbers, punctuation and a limited number of symbols – generally, only the characters you can see on a standard keyboard.

ASCII files are important because there are a number of computer systems that can only read ASCII files. You are most likely to run into these when you fill out an online form. The form will have text boxes that do not allow any formatting. Making your resume look good in a text box like this is tough, but it can be done.

The first thing you need to do is use extra lines to space things out. You can’t use indents, changes in font size or bolding to identify new sections. This requires using a new line to add space. Your resume will get longer, but this is a small concession to make it readable.

The next formatting trick you need to use is bulleted lists. You have to manually create bullets in an ASCII file. To do this, you should select a symbol or combination of symbols for your bullets. A few options to consider are: *, @, #, >, ->, –>, =>, and ==>. I’m not a big fan of the @ or #, but I do see these on a lot of resumes. My favorite is a single equals sign and a greater than symbol: =>. This stands out in a resume and really calls attention to a line without being overwhelming.

You can also add some underlining by using dashes, underscores or equal signs. Be cautious when using them. The lines will draw the reader’s attention. If your resume has a bunch of them, the lines will be distracting and make it difficult to read.

An ASCII resume will never be a pretty as a resume formatted in a word processing program. You would not submit an ASCII resume if you didn’t have to. Despite this, there will be times when you will have to have a plain text resume. Below is a sample of how you can format an ASCII version of your resume:

Work Experience
—————

Job Title, Company Name, Start to End Dates
City, State

Text describing the positions with a summary of your responsibilities. Keep this to two or three lines max.

=> Bullet point demonstrating an accomplishment
=> Bullet point demonstrating an accomplishment
=> Bullet point demonstrating an accomplishment

Job Title, Company Name, Start to End Dates
City, State

Text describing the positions with a summary of your responsibilities. Keep this to two or three lines max.

=> Bullet point demonstrating an accomplishment
=> Bullet point demonstrating an accomplishment
=> Bullet point demonstrating an accomplishment

Job Title, Company Name, Start to End Dates
City, State

Text describing the positions with a summary of your responsibilities. Keep this to two or three lines max.

=> Bullet point demonstrating an accomplishment
=> Bullet point demonstrating an accomplishment
=> Bullet point demonstrating an accomplishment

Education
———

Degree, School
Major

Skills
——

=> Skill
=> Skill
=> Skill
=> Skill
=> Skill
=> Skill

Provide Context for Common Acronyms

I read a resume today with a lot of acronyms. I’ve written about the problems of using acronyms in the past – they confuse the reader and can make a resume impossible to decipher. This should be simple to understand, but what if the acronym is used much more frequently than the term?

This was the case with the resume I received. The resume was from a person who sold displays using LED lights. The acronym I had trouble with was LED. The term light emitting diode is rarely used – it’s almost always writen as LED. The reason I had trouble with this abbreviation is the resume provided no context for the term. It was only after I reviewed the resume in detail that I figured out that the reference to LED was likely to be a reference to light emitting diodes. There are a lot of other terms that use the abbreviation LED. In fact, a search of website listing common abbreviations yielded 169 results for LED. These ranged from the airport code for the St. Petersburg airport in Russia, to organization terms such as Law Enforcement Division and Library Education Division, to medical conditions such as Lupus Erythematosus Disseminatus, and a wide range of other terms.

Light emitting diode is one the most common meanings for the term. The reason the resume is confusing is it provides no context for the term. There was nothing at the start of the resume that would implied light emitting diodes were the technology being referenced. Some readers would instantly think of this meaning and “get it.” Others would think of some other meaning or context and be completely lost.

This could have been made clearer by adding a single word. The salesperson sold LED signs. Adding the word signs makes the context of the acronym clear.

After you write your resume, look closely at the terms you use. Make sure terms specific to your industry are clearly explained. In your job search, you cannot expect the reader of your resume to know the meaning and context of technical terms you use. Providing a simple explanation of your career and of each individual job can make your resume much easier to comprehend.

Production Worker Interview Questions: Safety

The worst hiring result a company can have often relates a new employee being unsafe. There are too many horror stories of a new hire, on their first day, stepping off a loading platform, putting their hand in a machine where it shouldn’t go, or doing something unsafe and really stupid. In the worst cases, the new employee intends to get hurt, hoping to get a big worker’s comp settlement from the injury.

The worst hiring mistake a company can make often relates a new employee being unsafe. There are too many horror stories of a new hire, on their first day, stepping off a loading platform, putting their hand in a machine where it shouldn’t go, or doing something unsafe and really stupid. In most situations, the employee is extremely careless and is an accident waiting to happen. In the worst cases, the new employee intends to get hurt, hoping to get a big worker’s comp settlement from the injury.

The cost of a major injury can be significant. A back injury that requires surgery can cost in excess of a quarter of a million dollars. There are few ways a new employee can hurt a company this much this fast.

Being safe and following the safety procedures will help prevent injuries. Most importantly, following the safety procedures should eliminate most if not all the serious risks. Procedures like lock out/tag out need to be followed without exception. Failing to follow them will eventually get a person killed.

When hiring managers interview prospective production workers, they will usually try to get an idea of the candidate’s safety record and commitment to safety. Being able to answer these questions directly and honestly will help the impression you make. If you have been involved in a safety incident in the past, you will need to be able to explain the details, and what you would do differently. You can change something that happened, but you can learn from the experience. You will need to show what you learned and how you would act differently in the future.

Interview Questions:

Have you ever been involved in a safety incident?
When was the last time you committed a safety violation at work?
Describe your commitment to safety.
Tell me about a time when you helped a co-worker correct an unsafe behavior.
Tell me about the biggest safety hazard at your last job.
Tell me about the safety program at your last job.
What do you consider is most important, productivity, quality or safety?

Make sure you prepare to discuss safety in your next interview. Potential workers who show little interest or commitment to safety will get rejected quickly.