Hiring a warehouse operative
High volume, fast turnover, and a pile where the CV is often three lines. Most of what decides eligibility — shifts, right to work, sometimes a licence — is a fact rather than a judgment, which changes the whole shape of the screening job.
Most of the pile is resolved by facts, not by reading. Warehouse applications are short and interchangeable: previous employers, maybe a forklift ticket, rarely anything else. What actually varies is whether someone can work the shift pattern, and whether they are reliable — neither of which a CV states. Speed is the number managers reach for, and it is the weakest of the available signals: a fast picker who mis-picks costs more than a steady one, because every error travels to a customer and comes back as a return.
Two questions that settle most of the pile
Selene asks what a frontline, high-volume role turns on — shifts, pick rates, and whether tickets are funded in-house.
Shifts, pick rates, and who pays for the ticket
For a frontline role Selene goes after shift patterns and volume rather than tooling. The forklift question is the one that changes the guide most: if you fund the ticket, certification is a bonus; if you don't, it is a hard filter — and getting that backwards costs you either applicants or money.
One sentence changes the guide
"Turning up" is the bar most warehouse ads are quietly written to, and it is a real bar. But it doesn't separate anyone at the top of the pile. This answer does, and it inverts the metric managers usually reach for first.
Exceptional, not just good —
“The good ones turn up. The great ones spot a wrong pallet before it goes out the door.”
→ Accuracy was promoted to a must-have alongside the eligibility facts; raw pick speed became the lowest-weighted criterion on the guide.
What the guide ends up measuring
Seven criteria. Two are eligibility facts for the application page. The third must-have is not a fact at all — accuracy was promoted into the same tier because of one sentence in the conversation above, and pick rate, which most warehouse job ads lead on, is now the least important thing on the list.
Ask the shift question first, not last
On a 250-applicant pile the two facts that decide most of it are yes-or-no, and no CV states either. Asking them on the application page means the answer arrives with the application rather than on a phone call a week later, and it routinely resolves a large share of the pile before any scoring happens — which is time you don't spend and credits you don't spend either.
Scored on care, not on speed
Selene never receives the candidate’s name or the raw CV. She scores a blind, structured profile, with any stated age, sex, nationality and religion stripped out before scoring runs.
For a role drawing many applications from people whose first language is not English, that leaves the evidence and removes most of what would otherwise colour the read.
How the blind scoring works →What stays with you
Selene's half
- Turning the brief into requirements, and the eligibility ones into application-page questions
- Reading all 250 against the same guide, blind, with the evidence attached
- A ranked shortlist of the people who cleared the gates
- Drafting the declines, so the people you don't hire still hear back
Yours
- Advertising the roles — Selene doesn't post to job boards or sourcing sites
- Right-to-work and licence verification before anyone starts; she records what candidates state, she doesn't verify it
- The interview or trial shift, with her brief in hand
- Every hiring decision, and any override — stored with your reason
Start with one shift pattern
Three roles or thirty, one shift or round the clock — tell her the pattern and the gates write themselves.