Interview Questions for Safety

When safety is a top priority for your organization, it’s important to evaluate prospective employees for a safety mindset, or as some call it, a heart of safety. Your organization is committed to do no harm, counts days since last incidents publicly, celebrates successes of the facilities who are injury free, and might even hand out medals to the sites that set the bar high for the rest of the company. I’ve worked in companies like this and got a glimpse of what they do. I had the great fortune of working with gold, silver, and bronze sites. I also worked with some facility leaders who hadn’t earned an internal achievement status. I had a front row seat to something different they did in their hiring. The facilities who were “winning” internally asked EVERY SINGLE HIRE at least one safety question.

Curious about what resources are available for hiring teams and what most employers do, I went on the hunt for some safety interview questions and found this list on Glassdoor of questions people had been asked when interviewing for Safety Manager jobs. Frankly, most are disappointing. There are a few good ones in that list, but many have nothing to do with safety or getting at how an individual thinks about safety. Slow down your hiring and think about how you can add safety to your interviews. If you tell your employees you put safety first, hire for a safety mindset.

Concern for the safety of your workforce, your team, your coworkers, and your communities is important. It doesn't just meet a compliance requirement, it's the right thing to do. For those of you who are driving a safety culture, working on safety goals, continuing to improve your safety programs, or inventing one from scratch, below are some questions I commonly ask to assess a candidate’s safety mindset and experience. You get to choose how they should be answered based on what your company needs.

1.      Who has ownership of safety at work; why do you believe this?

2.      Tell me about a time when you saw someone doing something unsafe at work OR an unsafe working condition. What did you do when you made the observation?

3.      What experience do you have with implementing a new work process to increase worker safety either for yourself, a team you were part of, or for the whole organization?

4.      When evaluating the effectiveness of safety programs how do you define success and how do you measure it?

5.      Change is often met with resistance. Safety methodologies, rules, and regulations and our own internal approach to total safety can change. This may require the way we approach our work to change. For you personally, how do you adapt to new ways of doing work? For the teams you are (or have been) a part of, what do you think can prevent real change from taking place on how do you overcome it?

6.      Have you ever had to create a new process from scratch after learning something from a safety incident? What was the incident, what did you learn, who was involved, who did you need to partner with to implement the new process, what was the outcome of the new process?

Have others to add? Share them in the comments! Let’s work together to help one another bring safety to the interview.

Looking for a safety pro and struggling to fill the seat or just want a little assistance weeding through a mountain of applicants, get in touch with me.