manufacturing Archives - Palladian Career Resources

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?

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. Be prepared to discuss your reliability and you should be able to adapt to questions in this area.

Preparing for a Production Worker Interview

This year, we have watched the loss of hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs. The job market in manufacturing is tough, but it is far from being a lost cause. Manufacturing firms need to maintain certain staffing levels to meet production requirements. For a displaced production worker, particularly individuals who may not have looked for a job in the last twenty or thirty years, preparing to interview can be very difficult.

Interviewing for a job is not a skill everyone naturally possesses. In fact, most people are not very good at selling their potential in an interview (and a lot of them are downright terrible). Knowing how hiring managers assess job seekers can help your preparation.

In manufacturing, a supervisor might manage upwards of 100 production workers. Even with teams of only a few dozen, managing this many people can be difficult. The supervisor will have a wide range of tasks and responsibilities. When a single employee has performance problems, it can eat a tremendous amount of the supervisor’s time.

When hiring, a supervisor will look for characteristics which indicate the job seeker will not be a performance problem. In other words, the supervisor tries to pick out reasons why the job seeker will not succeed, and reject the job seeker for these reasons. If the supervisor can’t find a reason to reject the job seeker, they are likely to be hired.

What characteristics do supervisors consider?

Work Ethic: Supervisors want to build teams of people who work hard and do not need to be pushed to do their job. I’m sure you have worked with people at both ends of the spectrum – individuals who can’t sit still and will find work if they don’t have any, and individuals who sit and wait to be told what to do. The former is easy to manage and the latter can be a huge source of frustration for the supervisor.
Reliability: One of the biggest challenges in a production environment is dealing with unexpected absenteeism. Businesses run very lean, often with every scheduled employee performing an essential job. There are no extra workers sitting around in case someone is a no show. This makes reliability a big concern.
Attitude: The most productive employee can be a terrible part of a company if they have a bad attitude and destroy the morale on a team. We see this in sports all the time – a superstar whose’s attitude causes a good team to turn into a bad one. The same happens in production environments. Supervisors look for characteristics that show how a job seeker might be disruptive in a team environment.
Mechanical Ability: In a production environment, having good mechanical skills can help a new employ get up to speed quickly and make it much easier for the company to train them. Supervisors will look for past experiences that show good mechanical ability.
Safety: Supervisors want employees who will make good decisions and safety is a big part of this. There are workers who will do whatever they can to circumvent safety rules. I’ve never understood this. Failing to follow the safety rules can lead to serious injury and will often lead to termination. Despite this, there are people who just won’t follow the rules. They can be very difficult to deal with as a supervisor, and supervisors will try to avoid hiring people like this.

If a person can demonstrate they have a good work ethic, are reliable, have a positive attitude, have good mechanical ability and are concerned about safety, they have a good chance of getting hired.