Interviewing for Lead Warehouse Worker wondering if anyone has an idea of what type of interview it will be and questions they ask since it's not a Merit role?
I did some of the interviews for these and I can tell you that some people who were highly regarded were awful in the interview. Their answers gave away way too much about the kind of worker they are.
Interview is simple. Some OM's and SOM's ask for an elevator pitch. It's simple, who are you, what you do at target, briefly talk about your personal life outside of target (families, hobbies, etc), and why you want to be an LWW. The interviews I did myself and the SOMs asked for elevator pitches. But I know the some of the others didn't. Doesn't hurt to plan it anyway.
For the actual interview I write notes on three categories. Situation, Behavior, Outcome.
What was the situation? A couple of brief sentences explaining the situation.
It was fall season I was GPM POC and we were short staffed on the GPM team due to call-ons. Inbound had just received several high carton reserve trailers and depal was running light on freight which was jeopardizing their plan and overall throughput.
What were your behaviors? Specifically what did YOU do to address the situation. Avoid using we. Be confident but don't brag. It is okay to fluff and embellish a little bit here. No one is going to double check but DO NOT straight up lie. You'll get caught pretty quickly.
I recognized very quickly that we were running into a situation that meant the docks would soon be full and that we would soon by shutting down both departments. I remembered that two of the rack putters were GPM trained and that we did not have a lot of puts on the ground for them to work through because the team couldn't pull them off the dock fast enough so I spoke to my OM and let him know the situation and my thought that the rack putters could be temporarily switched to GPM. They agreed and I had them focus on clearing backhaul out for depal while the remaining GPMers focused on pulling freight off the docks and staging it up in the aisles, so that when the putters were done they could quickly return to work and limit their downtime.
Finally what was the outcome? Did your idea, plan, thought whatever work? And did you learn from it? Everyone seems to think that they're story should be some great victory, but I've had to do interviews where the question is "tell me about a time you failed". Some times stories were you dropped the ball are just as powerful so long as you have a strong outcome.
By being flexible with our resources the team was able to clear out both inbound and keep depal moving. From this I learned how important it is to speak out when I see issues, but also how important it is to make sure that I'm taking partnerships with the right people and why I personally always need to be adaptable to changing circumstances on the floor.
Now I pulled that story out of my thin air, but I'm sure 90% of people going for the interview have some story that's similar. And with a little tweaking in the first line that story can be made to answer just about any interview question. If I change the first line from
It was fall season I was GPM POC and we were short staffed on the GPM team due to call-ons. Inbound had just received several high carton reserve trailers and depal was running light on freight which was jeopardizing their plan and overall throughput.
To
It was fall season I was GPM POC we were short staffed and the gpm team was struggling because of how much harder we needed to work. Inbound had just received several high carton reserve trailers and depal was running light on freight which was jeopardizing their plan and overall throughput. This was creating an unsafe situation.
Suddenly my story is about safety. Or
It was fall season I was GPM POC and we were short staffed on the GPM team due to call-ons. Inbound had just received several high carton reserve trailers and depal was running light on freight which was jeopardizing their plan and overall throughput and I recognized that my leader had accidentally understaffed us because he missed a couple no call no shows at the board.
Now it's about giving feedback.
TL;DR version. Come up with 4-5 stories about cool stuff you did and make them flexible so that you can answer any question with one of your stories.
