A Short Guide for a Mail Carrier Interview
Date: August 24th, 2018
For all young aspirants, the job of mail carrier sounds exciting. It provides them with an opportunity to earn quite a good sum of money by just managing the collection and dispatch of mail in certain neighborhoods. Apparently, the job of mail carrier looks pretty simple. However, that’s not the case.
Mail carriers are responsible for handling mail on everyday basis regardless of the circumstances (bad weather etc.). This is the reason why aspirants for mail carriers are accessed for several characteristics after passing the postal exam 473. If you really want to work with USPS as a mail carrier, make sure that you can satisfy the examiners with the answers to following questions.
How Good are you With Details?
For mail carries, sorting the shipment according to the type of package and delivery route is the first and most important part of the job. Therefore, sharp memory and good attention to details are the major characteristics the interviewers look into when hiring people for these US postal jobs.
Mail carriers with these traits can sort and arrange the letters and other delivery items in less time, making the process more productive and streamlined. Mail carriers with good attention to detail actually do a favor to themselves.
It is important to tell the interviewers about the previous organizational experience of sorting the documents and mail if you have any.
How is Your Time Management Skills?
The quality of any courier service greatly depends on their time management and similar is the case of USPS. The collective time management quality of any mail service depends on the individual time management skills of its carriers. Therefore, expect to have detailed discussion with interviewers on your time management skills.
You might be asked to act and manage timelines in different situations. Let’s have a look at some of the time-related questions and conditions that can be part of the interview.
- How to ensure the whole route is delivered on time in case of overwork?
- How to manage and distribute the workload of occasional extra shifts? During holidays and around tax season, mail carriers often have to work extra shifts to make sure all the shipments remain on time on both ends.
How Good are you With Location Orientation?
It is important to understand that mail carriers are usually assigned with unfamiliar delivery routes. Therefore, it is also considered a desirable trait in a mail carrier to be good at finding out the locations and reaching the recipients.
Interviewers can ask any aspirant for these US postal jobs about their ability to locate the recipients. Interviewers also expect map reading, the know-how of GPS from mail carrier aspirants. In addition, a mail carrier must know how to take directions to reach a particular address.
Aside from these functional characteristics, aspirants for these US postal jobs must be in good shape. The job of a mail carrier, whether he is provided with a delivery truck or not, demands physical endurance.