Airlift’s culture is built around a few core values that define the behaviors and attitudes that we
seek in teammates:
● Hyper bias to action — we seek to partner with true doers,
● Be an obsessive learner — we love candidates who are eager to learn and grow,
● Move at lightning speed — we view speed as our greatest advantage.
As you go through the recruitment process, our suggestion is to incorporate the above value
system into your approach. Airlift leans on and reads heavily into the case study — we view the
effort and thoughtfulness of the response as a proxy for what we can expect from the candidate
on the team.
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The case study is divided into three core components.
Context — Airlift sorts, packs, store and deliver perishables from their specialized warehouse in
a storage space that extends over 25,000 sq ft. Each warehouse supplies a number of smaller
warehouses on a daily basis. From smaller warehouses, Airlift ships goods to customers via our
customer-facing grocery delivery application. As the company scales, it is running into major
operational roadblocks in its supply chain operations. As the Floor Operations Manager, you are
tasked with solving for the following problems:
Part I — Crisis Management
We have a team of 10 people at the warehouse divided between check-in, placement, sorting
and packing teams. Each team member is hired in line with the requirement of completing a
certain number tasks throughout the day to optimize for the complete workflow. They are given
a day-off on a rotating basis to keep operations running uninterrupted. 3 additional team
members have called in sick today which leaves you with only 6 people to work with. With each
team dedicated to their own tasks already, how will you manage the situation? What will you do
to avert such a crisis in the future?
Part II — Prioritization in Decision Making
We usually receive our shipments from suppliers through-out the day that are checked in and
stored on racks. At night, we ship items from our warehouse to our dark stores spread across
the city based on their requirements. A few of our shipments coming from outside the city today
got delayed together due to a blockade on the highway and have arrived late in the evening.
Each of these shipments have between 500-1,000 items and checking them in together will 3x
the usual time with the regular staff dedicated to check-in and placement. However, if we
reallocate other team members to check-ins, our nightly dispatch operations(shipping to dark
stores) will be disrupted and we might not be able to ship to dark stores in time.
What will you prioritize in this situation and why? How will you go about managing the workflow
in this scenario?
Part III — Team Management
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