Delivery Operations interview prep.

Behavioural questions to expect

1. Walk me through your CV.
2. Tell me about an operations problem you owned end-to-end - throughput, cost, safety, or customer experience.
3. Why last-mile delivery - versus middle-mile, warehouse operations, or supply-chain strategy?
4. Why operations - versus consulting, product, or commercial roles?
5. Why the firm?
6. What's your read on the firm's last-mile network and customer experience?
7. Tell me what you understand about how the firm runs its last-mile operations - tooling, driver model, safety posture.
8. A delivery zone's cost-per-stop has crept up 18% over six months while volume is flat. Walk me through your diagnosis.

Technical concepts to master

• Routing + density economics

  VRP (Vehicle Routing Problem) · Density + stops-per-hour · Stems + on-road time · Static vs dynamic routing · Dispatch ratio + route loading

• Station + depot throughput + sortation

  Station flow stages · Sortation - manual vs mechanized · Induction rate + dock balance · Volume + cube planning · Daily start time + cascade

• Driver / courier ops + safety + regulatory

  Recruiting + onboarding funnel · Retention + churn drivers · Safety cardinality + near-miss culture · Hours-of-service + regulatory frame · Telematics + dash-cam program

• Customer experience + on-time + first-attempt + exceptions

  On-time delivery (OTD) + delivery windows · First-attempt success rate · Proof of delivery (POD) + chain of custody · Exception handling - attempt + redelivery + return · Customer NPS + complaint handling

Practical drills

• A suburban parcel route runs 8 hours on-road, makes 120 stops, drives 95 miles total (10 stems out + 8 stems back). Driver fully-loaded wage is $32/hour. Van costs $0.65/mile all-in (fuel + depreciation + maintenance). Walk through cost-per-stop, stops-per-hour, density (stops per productive mile), and where the leverage is if we want to push cost-per-stop down 15%.
• Your delivery station is running outbound dispatch 30-45 minutes late every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. Mondays and Fridays are fine. Inbound line-haul is on time across all days. Walk through your diagnosis and the first three interventions.
• Peak is 8 weeks out. Your network's on-time delivery is running at 92%; the customer commitment is 96%. Volume in peak is forecast 35% above baseline. Walk through your recovery plan + the headline forecast math.

Smart-question anchors

• Service + network footprint - parcel + grocery + on-demand + quick-commerce mix, station density, urban vs rural posture
• Driver / courier model - gig vs employee, contracted partner network, recruiting funnel + retention posture
• Routing + dispatch tech - in-house vs commercial platform, dynamic vs static, AI / ML maturity
• Safety + regulatory posture - injury rate trajectory, telematics + dash-cam program, hours-of-service compliance culture
• Peak operations - peak hiring + fleet + station plans, recent peak performance

Sourced from

CSCMP State of Logistics + Last-Mile chapter (Kearney + CSCMP annual) · Last-Mile Experts + Pitney Bowes Parcel Shipping Index + ParcelHero · OSHA + DOT FMCSA Hours-of-Service + Vehicle Safety standards · Routific + Onfleet + Bringg + Locus.sh routing-platform documentation + practitioner blogs · Operations manager interview banks (Glassdoor + Indeed + Reddit r/logistics + RocketBlocks operations track) · MIT Center for Transportation + Logistics + Georgia Tech Supply Chain + Engineering Cluster