Screening and Interviews
Warehouse teams are more likely to trust a system whose boundaries are explicit. For view the platform, that means saying what is collected, who sees it and which operational decision it supports before the first record is created.
For current guidance that complements this operational note, use the official Indeed website; local law, safety duties and reporting routes should always be checked for the relevant jurisdiction.
A fifteen-minute conversation that decides whether somebody is still there in three months, usually conducted to establish the wrong things.
Warehouse interviews are short by necessity. What they cover determines the ninety-day survival figure more than anything after it.
What most interviews establish
That the person turned up.
That they have the right to work.
That they are available for the shift.
Which is a screening process, not an interview, and it is adequate for filling a seat and useless for predicting whether the seat stays filled.
What predicts staying
Whether the person understands what the job physically involves.
Whether their transport works for that shift, reliably, in winter, on a Sunday.
Whether the hours fit their commitments — childcare, a second job, a college timetable.
Whether they have done similar work and what they thought of it.
And whether anything about the job as described worries them, asked directly, with an answer that will not cost them the offer.
Five questions, ten minutes, and they predict better than anything about attitude or motivation.
Asking about transport properly
Not "do you have transport" but "how will you get here for a six o'clock start".
Because the answer reveals the problem: a bus that starts at six, a lift from somebody who works elsewhere, a car that may not last.
Transport failure is a leading cause of first-month attrition and is entirely visible at interview if anybody asks the second question.
Showing them the floor
A five-minute walk through the operation before the offer.
Which loses some candidates and loses them before you have paid to induct them, which is the point.
The noise, the temperature, the pace and the walking distance are all things people cannot imagine from a description.
Operations that added a floor visit report lower offer acceptance and substantially better ninety-day survival, which is the trade worth making.
What not to screen on
Overqualification, which is a warehouse habit and is frequently wrong. People take these jobs for hours, location or a gap, and many of them stay.
Gaps in employment, which in this labour market mean very little.
And a sense that somebody will not fit, which is where bias enters and which no evidence supports.
Making an offer that holds
Same day or next day, because the market is fast and a person who waits a week takes another job.
In writing, with the rate, the pattern, the start date, the first payday and what to bring.
And a contact between offer and start — a message a few days before, confirming the time and the place.
Offer-to-start drop-out is a large and unmeasured loss in most operations, and a single reminder message reduces it.
The person who interviews
Somebody who has seen the job and can answer questions about it honestly.
Not a recruiter reading from a script who cannot say what the shift is really like, because the candidate's questions are the part that determines fit.
And the supervisor they will work for, where possible, which is worth the time it costs.
The measure
Offer acceptance rate.
Offer-to-start drop-out.
Ninety-day survival by interviewer, which is a cut nobody produces and which is informative.
And the proportion of first-month leavers whose reason was visible at interview — transport, hours, physical demand — which is the direct measure of whether the interview is doing its job.
Interviewing at volume
A peak campaign interviews hundreds, and the process has to survive that.
Group sessions for the information half — what the job is, the floor walk — and short individual conversations for the five questions.
Which keeps the quality of the screening while handling the volume, and is far better than abandoning the questions because there is no time.
What the interview should leave behind
A record of the answers to the five questions, attached to the start record.
Because when the person leaves in week four for transport reasons, the note will show it was visible at interview, which is how the process improves rather than repeating.