Sample Interview Questions - Part 3

Let's continue looking at yet additional questions and scenarios you potentially may encounter during your interview process when seeking a logistics position. As I believe was mentioned before, some of these can be generic questions and may appear in an interview for any position, while others may be more related to the logistics field specifically.

As mentioned previously, some questions are specifically asked to see if they lead you to open up and reveal a true side of you that you may not be as forthright under normal circumstances. For instance, you may be asked to describe a situation where you had to deal with demands that may have been conflicting. Your job is to keep it professional, do not bad mouth co-workers, customers, or former employers. Answer with a short description of how you have handled the situation or what measures you would take to get everyone onto the same page with the conflict, and attempt to solve the conflict. If you start running at the mouth you may do more harm than good.

In most jobs, the ability to prioritize and effectively meet deadlines is a must have skill, so you may be asked something like "describe how you might prioritize demands that seem unreasonable." In other words, what if you were told you have till the end of the day to complete a certain amount of tasks, and you knew it was an impossibility to do so. What steps would you take to seek to accomplish as much as possible or to actually complete them all? You might explain that if you knew assistance would be needed to complete the tasks that you would indeed let the supervisor know, and ask them to assign others to assist. If that is not an option, then you might need to let your supervisor know that additional time would be needed, or you may need to ask for approval of overtime hours to accomplish the tasks. Otherwise, you would just state that you would examine the work due, determine which order of priority seemed most beneficial, and would work hard to be efficient with your time to accomplish as much as possible with the time and manpower allotted to you. You need to show that you would indeed be dedicated in seeking all means of either finishing the tasks in the time required, or accomplishing as much as you can and being able to properly justify the lack of completion.

I'll stop here and pick up with more next time.

Jeff McCormack resides in Virginia Beach, VA. where he works as a web designer by day. In his off time he is a husband, father, mail order book store manager, and musician. Aside from being a freelance writer for this Logistics Jobsite blog, he also seeks to assist in career choices and information by contributing to other Nexxt blog sites.