Food Safety Practitioner Interview Questions
If you were going to interview a new Food Safety/Quality Practitioner position, what questions would you ask? This is you as the interviewer. Just curious.
I should probably add that we will start do interviews for this position today and early next week. Just looking for abnormal questions to ask my interviewees.
Things that I would ask include:
- What experience do you have in developing a food safety plan and system? (Trying to learn if they just followed existing programs or actually did the DEVELOPING of the programs or parts of programs)
- How do you handle supervisors and managers who might not want to implement your systems? (I think 'threading the needle' between convincing production and shipping personnel to do what you want without clubbing them on the head with it so they resent you is one of those X factor soft skills that can make implementing a food safety system much much easier. I would want my candidate to start with working with the supervisor, to explain the need and win them over but, if that doesn't work, get senior management involved. I wouldn't want someone who would just run to senior management right away or who would accept not implementing the program at all)
- What is your mental hierarchy of importance between meeting customer needs, food safety, production efficiencies, and management expectations as it relates to your roll as food safety and quality lead? (If the candidate put anything above 'food safety' I would really be hesitant to hire. I'm ok with flexibility on the other items if they're justified. I think I'd like the answer "Food safety is always job one and the most important. After that, ensuring that quality meets or exceeds customer expectations. Of course we balance this with production efficiencies and management expectations but sometimes you need to sacrifice efficiency to make sure you're servicing the customer.")
- Can you talk a little about your experience with corrective and preventative actions, audits, and inspections. (I want to make sure they understand the difference between inspection actions [conditions as they are now] vs. an audit action [historical data about the process] and describe CAPAS as a tool for continuous improvement or talk about issuing them based on audit results. I'd also like to hear the words 'root cause' somewhere in the description of CAPAS.)
I'm sure there's more, but those are those popped into my head first.
- What experience do you have in developing a food safety plan and system? (Trying to learn if they just followed existing programs or actually did the DEVELOPING of the programs or parts of programs) We have a current food safety plan and system in place, they will be taking over an existing system.
How do you handle supervisors and managers who might not want to implement your systems? I like this question very much. Thank you
Can you talk a little about your experience with corrective and preventative actions, audits, and inspections. I like this question a lot too.
Thank you very much for your input. if you have anymore please send my way,