What do you look for in entry level job candidates?

For me I always wanted to fiddle with mechanical stuff. When I was tested in school my highest mark was mechanical aptitude. The different gears and which way they rotated was one test I always did well on.

Any other class besides wood shop, metal shop or mechanical drawing sucked as far as I was concerned. In fact I didn't like school at all. I liked math and history was ok but English & science class….forget it.

I scraped by and graduated and caught hell at home at report card time. I had 2 older sisters 1 who became a teacher and I never say her do homework or anything it all came so easy for her she graduated at the top of her class. My other sister is a nurse and a perfectionist. If she got a "B" she would have a breakdown. She had to work a little harder than her sister but not much.

Then their was me. The black sheep of the family LOL.

I was always in trouble. My father would come home and look for the box of nails he bought only to find out I used them all.

Or his old drill, you know the "first cordless drill" the one with the gear and crank that stored the bits in the handle that I drilled all the drill bits into the ground in the backyard or the time I plugged in a cord with nothing on the other end and decided black must go to white. Stuff like that.

It all changed when I went to community college to take heating and air-conditioning. I had a super math teacher, flunked science but everything else was good.

When I graduated and got my first job at an oil company I couldn't get enough of it.

you guys already mentioned lots of good stuff, but I wanted to add this: Driving record and legal record

during the interview, ask about license status and driving record. Is there any history we should know about, etc.

Then when you run the driving record, does it jive with what they said? We've had plenty of guys tell us that they have a clean record but then when we run their license, it comes back with really bad driving records and even suspended licenses.

If someone interview and tells us, "hey I know I have a poor driving record but i've changed" we appreciate their honesty and keep them in consideration. But if they tell us it's clean and it comes back bad, sorry, no shot, because if they're lying about that what else are they going to lie about going forwards.

Same thing with a background check. We've hired guys with records and they are/were some of our best guys. Many people are young and dumb for a while but the good ones grow up and change. We're willing to give them a shot if they are honest about the past. But if they try to hide it, sorry, we're not interested.

smart move, keep the flat earthers out, everyone knows the earth is shaped like a dinosaur 😁

https://dinosaurearthsociety.com/

Sorry to be "that guy", but question 6 in the Mechanical Reasoning Test is at best poorly written, and at worst flat out wrong. The question is:

6. Pushing a ball

You are required to push a 180 pound ball to a storage platform 15 feet higher than where you are now. You can use a 45 foot long ramp to push the ball up. How much effort is required to push the ball up the platform using the ramp?

And the choice of answers is:

30 lb, 45 lb, 60 lb, 90 lb, or 135 lb

The issue with the question is that they state that you can use a "45 foot long ramp". With a ramp that is actually 45 feet long end to end the bottom of the ramp would actually be about 42'-5" from the storage platform. It's right triangle geometry. The sum of the squares of both sides (15' and 42'-5") equals the square of the hypotenuse (45'). So to figure the force required you'd multiply the ratio of the rise (15') over the lateral distance (42'-5") by 180 pounds and you'd end up needing a force of about 63.6 pounds.

If you want the ramp to actually reach out 45 feet from the 15 foot high platform the ramp would need to be about 47'-5" long.

And no, I don't work in HVAC-R. Pretty sure I'd get on everybody's nerves inside of one day on the job… 😄