Interview Questions Archives - Palladian Career Resources

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.

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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.

Production Worker Interview Questions: Mechanical Ability

In a production environment, the ability to understand how the equipment works is an important skill. Having extensive mechanical experience can speed up training and make an employee more versatile. It can also help an employee work safer and more productively.

Every position requires certain technical skills. In manufacturing, there is wide range of skills that companies may want. To build a strong team of production workers, a company can’t always require every skill. For example, a company may be the only one in the area with specific type of machinery. They will not be able to find new employees who have experience with that machinery. This makes it essential to hire individual with strong mechanical skills that can be applied to wide range of equipment.

To demonstrate your mechanical skill, you will need to show a long track record of mechanical experience. Ideally, you have been working with heavy equipment, repairing machinery and improving your mechanical skills for your entire career. For example, an individual who grew up on a farm and learned to repair the farming equipment from a young age will have an excellent understanding of the basic mechanisms of machinery. You can’t train a new hire and give them the insight that comes with 10, 20 or 30 years of fixing a wide range of machinery.

In addition to showing the range of experiences, you should give some specifics of the type of mechanical work you have done. Talking in generalizations will only get you so far. Describe major repair work, examples of operating complicated machines, or installing equipment. This will give the interviewer a clear picture of your skill level reinforcing the broad scope of your experience.

Interview Questions:

Tell me about your manufacturing experience.
Describe your mechanical skills.
Do you have any experience setting up and operating equipment?
What are you strongest technical skills?
Can you read engineering drawings?
What types of equipment have you worked on?
Do you consider yourself very mechanically inclined? Why?

If you want a job in manufacturing but have no mechanical experience, answering these questions can be tough. There isn’t an quick fix. Developing mechanical skills takes years. You can start by taking some classes at local Vo Tech school or community college. Find out from the employer you are pursuing what types of classes will best prepare you for their organization. Few people will go to the effort to do this, and it will set you apart.

Production Worker Interview Questions: Attitude

As a job seeker, you want to show how you will work well on a team and add to the overall performance. To do this, you should prepare to discuss times when your teamwork led to success. Also, prepare to discuss specific situations when you encountered conflicts with co-workers and supervisors. You want to show how the conflict arose and what you did to help resolve it.

One of the worst hires a company can make is a person who does their job well but has an attitude so bad that it destroys the teamwork and morale in a department. Often an individual like this can hurt the performance of a department so much that they end up being a net drain on the company. The greatest challenge with a person like this is that their individual performance meets expectations. It is how they interact with the team that is a problem.

As a manager, dealing with a person like this requires significant time and energy. It’s easy to handle quantifiable performance problems like attendance. Subjective performance problems are tougher. The easiest and best way to manage teamwork, morale and employee attitudes is to hire people who won’t be a problem. Once hired, it can take a long time to correct the behavior or get rid of the person.

Interview Questions:

Tell me about a time when you didn’t get along with your boss.
Tell me about the worst boss you ever had?
Tell me about a time when you had a conflict with a co-worker.
Tell me about a time when you disagreed with your supervisor.
Tell me about a time when you didn’t support a project in your department.
Tell me about a co-worker you didn’t get along with.
Tell me about a time when your supervisor criticized your work.
Tell me about at time when you disagreed with your co-workers.

If you prepare answers to questions like these, you will be able to better show how you will contribute to the team and be an effective team member. Develop a few stories with examples of conflicts you had at work and show how you resolved those conflicts. You goal isn’t to avoid discussing conflicts. Everyone has disagreements and conflicts at some point. What is important is how you deal with the conflict. Do you elevate the conflict, cause a disruption in the organization, or do you diffuse the situation?

Production Worker Interview Questions: Reliability

Being reliable is an important attribute for every job seeker to demonstrate. For production workers, this is especially important. Manufacturing firms often have complex operations where every worker is fulfilling an essential role. Workers may only be trained on a few pieces of equipment, making it difficult to find backfills. A single worker who fails to come to work can disrupt an entire department.

The complexity of some manufacturing organizations makes it essential to build a reliable workforce. Hiring managers will ask job seekers about their attendance in interviews. They will also ask about attendance in reference checks. This makes it important to be honest. You don’t want to say you had perfect attendance in an interview and then have a former employer say something different.

As important as reliability is, you don’t need a history of perfect attendance to get hired. You need to show that being reliable is important to you. You also need to show a track record where your reliability was good, meeting or exceeding the expectations of your employers.

Some industries have large season fluctuations. In these organizations, having a work force that can adapt their schedules to increasing or decreasing hours can be important. Your reliability will also include your ability to work overtime when needed. A hiring manager will want to know if you can be counted on to show up when they add an extra shift or extend the hours of a shift.

No one is going to get hired because of their reliability. This is a topic designed to weed out unreliable people. Your goal is to show you reliable enough to meet the expectations of the hiring manager.

Interview Questions:

Describe your attendance at .
How many times did you call in last year?
How important is it to you to be on-time?
In our busy season, will you be able to work weekends?
Can you work any of our shifts, including either second or third shift?
During your training, you will need to work on different shifts to get trained. Will this be a problem?
When was the last time you were late for work?

Production Worker Interview Questions: Work Ethic

In an interview for a production worker, questions about the job seeker’s work ethic are routine. Hiring managers want to hire individuals who are going to take initiative and strive to be successful. They don’t want to hire someone who is going to try to get out of work at every opportunity. In addition to be a drain on the company, individuals with a poor work ethic are more difficult to manage because they must be watched much closer.

Almost every job seeker will claim to be a hard worker in an interview. Everyone’s work ethic is not the same, though. What one person considers hard working may be slacking off to another. This requires you to do more than claim to be hard working in an interview.

To show a hiring manager your work ethic, you need to discuss your past experiences. In particular, you should describe times when you work autonomously, times when you went above and beyond expectations and times when you took initiative. If you can give specific examples of these situations in an interview, you will give yourself an edge over your competition.

Typical Questions:

Tell me about a time when you worked with little or no contact with your supervisor.
Tell me about a time when you finished your scheduled work early. What did you do?
Tell me about a time when you exceeded your supervisor’s expectations.
Tell me about a time when you took the initiative to do something without being told.
How would you describe your work ethic?
How did your performance rate compare to others doing the same job?
What expectations did you have to meet and what was your performance level?
When have you volunteered for a tough assignment you really didn’t want?
If you knew you couldn’t get all your work done on time, what would you do?
How to do you handle stress?

The questions above are just a sampling of the questions you might see in an interview. There are hundreds or thousands of questions you may see in an interview. To prepare effectively, you can’t memorize answers to each. You need to develop a selection of stories that illustrate your experience, skills and accomplishments. If you prepare a few stories from your experience that show your work ethic and can answer the questions above, you should be able to adapt to unexpected questions about your work ethic easily.

Interview Question – Why You Left Each Job

In almost every interview, you will be asked why you left your previous employers. This is a question designed to uncover reasons for the hiring manager to reject you. It will not help you get the job and is a question you need to survive.

The reasons you left a company can provide a lot of insight into your performance, potential and motivation. With this question, a hiring manager is trying to see if there is something in the candidate’s background that will lead them to eventually fire the candidate. If another company fired someone for poor performance, a hiring manager will typically assume the candidate will perform similarly. You can change this perception if you prepare and speak honestly about the experience.

It would be nice if every candidate was always successful and never had a bad career experience. This would render a question about leaving a former employer unimportant. The truth is most people have failed at some point in their careers. The failure might be minor, involving an unsuccessful project, or it could be major, involving a significant performance problem resulting in termination.

To be successful answering this question, you need to do three things. First, you need to be honest. Never make up something that isn’t true. Second, take responsibility for your performance. I have interviewed candidates who blame everyone but themselves. This makes a terrible impression and will sink your chances. Third, show what you have learned from the experience and would do differently.

Confidence is important when talking about your failures. The more you avoid a question about a time when you failed, the more the hiring manager will ask about it. With a goal of trying to uncover reasons to not hire you, the hiring manager will look for signs of a problem. Once something is identified, the hiring manager will ask follow up questions until it is clear whether the situation warrants rejecting the candidate.

If you were fired, you need to be able to explain what you would do differently. This doesn’t necessary mean you would be able to change a failure into a success. A lot of people have tried one career and found they weren’t suited to it. That’s fine. You just need to be able to explain what it was about that career that was not a match for your skills and abilities. If you aren’t changing fields, then you need to show what you learned from the experience. Failure is a great teach – if you are open to learning. Showing how you learned from failures can be as impressive as a success.

Behavioral Interview Questions for Training and Mentoring

A Behavioral Question asks the candidate do describe how they acted in a specific situation. This technique uses this past performance of the candidate to predict how they will perform in the future. Included are a selection of behavioral questions targeting training and mentoring responsibilities.

Developing employees is critical to the success of an organization. Almost every position in a company will train or mentor someone else in the company at some point. Some positions have only minor training responsibilities, while other positions are full time training roles. In either case, you may encounter questions about your experience training or mentoring.

Behavioral interview questions provide a good way to ask about training and mentoring skills. A Behavioral Question asks the candidate to describe how they acted in a specific situation. This technique uses the past performance of the candidate to predict how they will perform in the future. Below is a selection of behavioral questions targeting training and mentoring responsibilities:

Tell me about a time when you trained a new hire.
Tell me about a time when you retrained someone who was struggling in their job.
Tell me about a time when you mentored a coworker successfully.
Tell me when you trained a superior.
Tell me about a time when you mentored coworker but failed to help them improve.
Tell me about a time when you delegated a task for developmental reasons.
Tell me about a time when you brought in an outside expert to train your team.
Tell me about a time when you taught a group in a seminar.
Tell me about a time when you utilized interactive training techniques.
Tell me about a time when you overcame disruptive behavior from a seminar participant.
Tell me about the greatest training challenge you have faced.
Tell me about a time you had to train a group on a topic you were not an expert in.
Tell me about a time when you implemented new technology to facilitate training.
Tell me about a time when you identified a training need in an organization that had been unmet.
Tell me about a time when the training you delivered resulted in significant bottom line results in the organization.
Tell me how you would train me to do… (insert a common task or topic in your industry).

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Other Great Books to help you prepare for Behavioral Interviews:

There Are No Stupid Interview Questions

Have you ever been asked a question in an interview that strikes you as complete ridiculous? The kind of question that makes you wonder how the person across the desk was able to get their job if they think a question like that is valuable.

At some point in your job search, you may be asked a question that seems valueless, or just plain stupid. Some people react to a question like this by making a joke out of it, asking if the interview is serious or stating that they think it’s dumb question. These responses are mistakes.

If an interviewer asks a question, they have a reason for asking it. It’s important to them. It may indeed be ridiculous and the basis of the question may not make any sense to you, but the interviewer asked it because they want the answer. If your reaction shows you don’t respect the question, it will hurt your chances. Even worse, the interviewer may have a very good reason for asking the question due to some detail of the position you do not know.

There are no stupid interview questions. Regardless of your feelings of the value of a question, the judge of each question and answer is the interviewer. Additionally, there are interviewers that intentionally throw in off the wall questions to see how the candidate will react. In this case, the interviewer doesn’t really care about the answer. They are more interested in the ability of the job seeker to stay focused and professional.

As you prepare for an interview, it is important to consider how you will react to a question that completely surprises you. No matter how much you prepare, there is always a chance that the interviewer will ask a question you didn’t anticipate. How you respond to being blindsided can make or break an interview.

If you get a question that surprises or stumps you, take a few seconds to answer. A short pause to think will not hurt the impression you make. If you need more than a couple seconds, stall. A simple phrase, such as: “That’s an interesting question,” followed by a restatement of the question can help you formulate your answer. Avoid the temptation to just start talking. Many people, when nervous and faced with a question they didn’t expect panic and start talking immediately – before they know what they are going to say. If you avoid this, you will make a much better impression.

Behavioral Interview Questions for Project Engineers

Project engineers identify, plan and implement projects with organizations. The scope of this field is extremely broad. There are a number of common elements to project engineering roles, and these elements are often assessed with behavioral interview questions.

A behavioral interview targets specific situations the job seeker is likely to encounter in the role and asks for examples of a similar experiences. The questions usually follow a “Tell me about a time when you…” format.

Tell me about a time when you led a large capital improvement project.
Tell me about a time when you managed the acquisition of new equipment.
Tell me about a time when you planned a facility expansion.
Tell me about a time when you redesigned a process.
Tell me about a time when you made improvements to the plant layout.
Tell me about a time when you designed a new product.
Tell me about a time when you redesigned the packaging of a product.
Tell me about a time when you added automation to a process.
Tell me about a time when you had trouble debugging a new piece of equipment.
Tell me about a time when you reduced the utility costs in a facility.
Tell me about a time when you changed a process to reduce material handling.
Tell me about a time when you managed a project that came in under budget.
Tell me about a time when you managed a project that exceed budget.
Tell me about a time when you led a project that fell behind schedule.
Tell me about a time when you delivered a project ahead of schedule.
Tell me about the most successful project you managed.
Tell me about a project that was a major failure.
Tell me about a time when you failed to plan an essential step in a project.
Tell me about a time when you delegated effectively.

To be prepared to answer these questions in an interview, you need have examples of specific projects you have managed. You do not need a project for every question. A selection of projects touching on a range of experiences will allow you to adapt to almost any question.

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Other Great Books to help you prepare for Behavioral Interviews: