Latest / The Refrigeration Mentor Podcast / Episode 397. How to Land and Nail a Refrigeration Technician Job Interview

Transcript

Episode 397. How to Land and Nail a Refrigeration Technician Job Interview · The Refrigeration Mentor Podcast

• 0:00
  Speaker 3: My name is Trevor Matthews, founder of RefrigerationMentor.com. Over the past decade, I've trained tens of thousands of refrigeration technicians and contractors on supermarket refrigeration, and I've seen the same problem across the industry. Technicians are under pressure, second-guessing, and getting stuck on jobs too long.
• 0:03
  You gotta be honest about your actual field experience. Even if you don't have a lot, you can really subset that with the knowledge that you have and how you're going to approach stuff, which we'll talk about, like systems you've worked on before. You know, if you have control knowledge or what you study in control knowledge, you know, electrical troubleshooting.
• 0:06
  Companies really rather honesty and a hungry technician than any arrogant or know-it-alls or someone who has, you know, all this knowledge. You know, if you have all this knowledge, but you're not a team player, you can't talk to customers, you're not gonna, y- you're not gonna last there. So it's, it's all about when you're in this job interview, is thinking about what you've done in the past, preparing for the interview, 'cause there's so many people that do not prepare.
• 0:09
  You know, I close the suction service valve, and I watch the compressor pump down, and I can get right down to zero PSI. And when I get to zero PSI, that should not raise back up. If it does, there could be a potential chance it's leaking. I do need to make sure that I close the oil line if it's on a parallel rack system."
• 0:12
  Speaker: Learning how to communicate technically is so, so important, you know. Employers really love and service managers love technicians who can explain problems clearly. They don't th- they don't talk in circles. It's not gray. And this is what you can learn. Even just-- I've had technicians take the Supermarket Academy, and afterwards they were able to just talk about a problem consistently like glide or EPRs or CDS valves, multiflex boards, tearing a compressor apart.
• 0:15
  I just need the opportunity out there. You know, interviews are just really evaluating how you think and thinking about how you can really explain problems clearly. What-- When you find the data, what that, does that really mean? That's what you really wanna talk about, and that's where it really helps you just to start getting you to that next level, not just what you know, you know.
• 0:18
  Maybe I haven't been with as much hands-on yet, but I'm gonna get that hands-on, and I'm gonna provide this opportunity for the company." 'Cause employers think in the terms of profitability, reliability, customer satisfaction, you know, team culture, reduced callbacks, these different things. This is what they are looking for.
• 0:21
  On-call sucks for sure. It's not always fun, but it's the best place to learn and you make more money. Because if you take on-call once a month, it's not fun. I've, I've done lots of on-call, but if you took it once a month, and it depends on the structure, ? Like if you're doing a week at a time, that's 12 on-calls a year.
• 0:24
  You know, learn compressor fundamentals, learn refrigeration fundamentals, understand control basics. You don't have to be an expert, but if you could name all the different types of controllers and how to log into a couple of them and what a node is or what a multiplex board is, you're way ahead of the game than a lot of technicians going into that interview, right?
• 0:27
  Because you're not gonna know all the systems that they're gonna work on. "What does growth actually look like here? Like, where can I be in two, three years? Where could I be in five years? Where could I be in five years if I crush it every day for the next five years? What's the opportunities like?" Now, if it's a small company, there might, there might be a little less opportunity than at a larger company.
• 0:30
  Organized too, so you gotta talk about being organized. Some days it'll get pretty messy. On Friday afternoon, a long weekend, you had a crazy 70-hour week you know, but you gotta do your best at that. Have the driver abstract, you know, and be reliable, ? Talk about reliability and, and proven reliability in the past.