Supply Chain Saturday

I was on a coaching call recently helping someone prep for upcoming Supply Chain interviews. He had a great background. Years of leadership experience in food service, managed a large team, handled inventory ordering, tracked performance metrics daily. All the right ingredients.

But when I asked him to walk me through a story he could tell in an interview, he froze. He didn’t think he had any stories worth telling. So I just asked him to tell me about a time something went wrong at work.

He didn’t even hesitate. He told me about a morning where they were running a big promotion and burned through their supply faster than expected. The delivery truck that was supposed to restock them was late. Two hours late. And they were completely out of one of their most important products before the doors even opened.

Without overthinking it, he called a nearby location at 5:45 in the morning, confirmed they had extra supply, sent someone to pick it up, and had everything ready before the first customer walked in at 6:30. Problem solved. No disruption. Nobody on the outside ever knew anything went wrong.

He looked at me like I had just done a magic trick. But all I did was put a frame around what he already lived through.

That’s the STAR method (Situation, Task, Action, Result). It might sound like typical career center advice, but companies like Amazon structure their entire interview process around it. If you don’t answer behavioral questions in this format, you don’t move forward. I’ve seen it firsthand.

He had been stressing about not having “supply chain stories” because he hadn’t worked in the industry yet. But sourcing a product from an alternate location under time pressure to prevent a client disruption is a supply chain story. He was living them every week; he just hadn’t framed them that way.

Here’s what I would encourage this week.

Think about the last time something went sideways at work—a shortage, a late delivery, a staffing bottleneck, or a broken process. Now walk yourself through it using STAR. You probably have three or four of these already. You just need to pull them out and practice saying them out loud.

Not memorized or scripted, but clear enough that when an interviewer asks, “Tell me about a time you solved a problem under pressure,” you don’t freeze. You tell your version of the “biscuit crisis.” The best interview answers don’t come from prep books; they come from the real moments you’ve already lived.

I’ll see you next Saturday,
– Mark