Discovered that your nearby USPS office has opened up a number of listings Mail Handler? Know that despite this being everyday and essential worker position, their selection, and hiring process utilized to choose who gets the job can be difficult and horribly competitive.
After all, the USPS needs to make sure that whoever they pick can not only perform the duties of a USPS Mail handler but also behave and act accordingly like one.
With the organization being linked to public service and reliability to deliver packages and personal documents to the American public at large, it is not enough that someone’s resume looks like that of a good mail handler as blindly hiring someone merely based on it can be disastrous.
As a result, it includes the USPS postal exam 475 in the hiring process to make sure that the candidate has the basic work and interpersonal skills needed to be a good employee.
So if you want to be seen as the best candidate for the job, you need to do this right the first time around, not only because you may not know when the company will have another opening, but also because you have to wait a full year to retake it if you fail the exam.
- Learn the part
The first section or subject that you will encounter in the Virtual Entry Assessment – MH (475) for mail handlers is the Work Scenarios assessment where, if you underestimate it or answer carelessly, might just ruin your chances of being hired completely.
Although this part of the 475 postal exam only contains 9 questions or situations for you to solve, this is included in the assessment because the USPS wants to make sure that you are someone with the mindset and work ethic of an effective mail handler, if not at least someone that can be trained to be one.
In a nutshell, the USPS 475 Postal Exam Work Scenarios follow a situational judgement test-type format and the questions here will revolve around you having to deal with a problem or conflict that a mail handler usually encounters while on the job.
These can range from technical problems to interpersonal conflicts of varying intensities.
A good example for the latter is that a coworker is carelessly handling the parcel of a customer and then playing it off as nothing to worry about because it can be considered as damage taken while in transit.
From here, you will then be given four courses of actions and you must choose which of them you are most or least likely to take if you were already a USPS employee.
Although the answers may be hard to pinpoint since you have to be somewhat familiar with the duties of a mail handler, the trick here is to read up on the duties and responsibilities of a USPS mail handler, especially the ones supplied in the job order or listing because the questions never usually go beyond those areas.
- Learn to spot mistakes in long ‘strings’
The next part of the 475 postal exam is the ‘Checking for Errors’ section where you will be given a number of ‘sets’ containing a mini-database of sorts.
This database will contain a number of rows, from 4 to 12, containing a computer-generated group of numbers, addresses, or string of characters.
The questions will come in the form of you having to confirm whether or not the information inside a certain row matches perfectly with each other.
This is because this section of the 475 postal exam aims to mimic the act of an employee making sure that they are inputting the correct information into the system, computer, cash register, and other tasks that require them to double check what’s on them so that they won’t accidentally charge the customer wrong or send the parcel to a different address.
A good way to prepare for this is to set up a generator to create strings of random characters and try to type them perfectly all the while dictating it so that you can be sure that it’s a match. Another way of doing this is to take a Virtual Entry Assessment – MH (475) for Mail Handlers practice test where you can find a curated mock test where you have to do exactly what’s expected in the actual exam.
- List down your work history as accurately as possible
If there’s one thing that disqualified or ruined the chances of many candidates in the 475 USPS postal exam despite them being bright and competent enough for the job, it would be the fact that they misrepresented themselves in the “Tell Us Your Story” section or left out an important detail in their employment history, intentional or not.
This is because doing so will make the hiring manager think that you are hiding something from them, and thus you cannot be trusted for the position that you are applying for.
Fortunately, the best way to prevent this is to be honest and not to leave out or falsify any work-related details in this section.
- Try to get into the mindset of a mail handler
The last section of the 475 postal exams is a personality-type test of sorts where you will have to put in your responses on a five-point-like scale based on what statements are presented.
This is where many candidates also stumble due to them thinking that this is just a ‘run of the mill personality test’ when in reality its purpose is to figure out if you have the personality, or at least have a compatible enough personality, of a mail handler.
Since this follows a survey-like personality test, it is difficult to pinpoint exactly what the correct answers are but the best way to get around this is to remember what the duties and responsibilities of a mail handler are.
This means having to answer in the affirmative when it comes to statements that may be related to being a hard worker and not being averted to doing manual labor or menial tasks from time to time, having a good attention to detail due to the nature of the ‘checking for errors’ section, and being cooperative, polite, and respectful no matter who the person they are interacting with as this will prove their ability to handle customers of various backgrounds as well as with coworkers; among other traits.