Journeyman electrician interview questions to ask

The best journeyman electrician interview uses 8 to 10 questions about real work, asked the same way to every man and scored on a 1 to 5 sheet. Ask him to walk a past job, handle a safety call, read a print and answer three or four code questions with the NEC edition named. Then put a bender in his hands. A 45-minute interview built this way tells you more than an hour of "tell me about yourself."

Most interview lists online are written for residential service or for any trade with "electrician" swapped in. This one is for a commercial or industrial journeyman: pipe, gear, prints and a foreman who needs him to run without hand-holding. It's one step in hiring a journeyman electrician, after the phone screen.

01Run it as a structured interview

A structured interview means every applicant gets the same questions in the same order, and every answer is scored on the same scale. That's how the US Office of Personnel Management defines it: "All candidates are asked the same predetermined questions in the same order," and "All responses are evaluated using the same rating scale and standards for acceptable answers" (OPM).

Why bother in a trade shop? Three reasons.

1. You can compare men. Two foremen interviewing two hands on two different days can still line them up.
2. It's fair and it holds up. Same questions for everyone is the simplest defense if a no gets challenged.
3. It stops the gut call. The likable guy who can't bend pipe scores a 2 on bending, no matter how good the conversation was.

Write the sheet before the first interview. For each question, write what a 1, a 3 and a 5 sound like. The bank below gives you the strong and weak ends.

02The scoring scale

Score each answer right after he gives it. Don't wait until he leaves.

03Work questions (with strong and weak answers)

This is a starting bank, built from what shops test for on the Mike Holt Forum. It's not an industry standard. Swap in your own work.

1. Walk me through your last job from week one to when you pulled the pin.

• Strong: names the job type and size, where he started (underground, rough, gear), what he ran himself, who was under him, and why he left. The story has a sequence.
• Weak: "Commercial job. Did a bit of everything." No sizes, no sequence, no "I."

2. Tell me about a conduit rack you laid out. How did you make the offsets line up?

• Strong: talks about the order he bent them in, where he put his starting marks, keeping the same centerline on every offset, and checking with a level.
• Weak: "The journeyman laid it out, I bent what he marked."

3. You're energizing a new panel for the first time. What do you check before you close the main?

• Strong: every termination torqued to the label and marked, no tools or scraps in the can, neutrals and grounds where they belong for that panel (bonded only at the service), covers on, everyone clear, the right people told. He mentions verifying the feed before and after.
• Weak: "Make sure the breakers are off and flip it on."

4. Your apprentice is about to land a conductor on something you're not sure is dead. What do you do?

• Strong: stops him, locks and tags it out, tests the meter on a known live source, tests the conductor, tests the meter again. Then lets him land it. This is a character question as much as a safety one.
• Weak: "Tell him to be careful," or "It's probably off."

5. Here's a print. This run goes from point A to point B. How would you do it?

Hand him one real sheet: a floor plan with a panel schedule, or a one-line. One national electrical contractor told us this is exactly how they define a journeyman: "Give the prints to a journeyman and say, hey, this goes from point A to point B. Knock it out."

• Strong: reads the symbols and notes without asking what they are, finds the homerun and panel, asks about the route, the box sizes or the ceiling heights. Good questions are a good sign.
• Weak: can't find the panel, or guesses at symbols.

6. Tell me about something you redid because it wasn't right, even though nobody would have caught it.

• Strong: a real example, and it bugged him. Pride in the work.
• Weak: can't think of one, or says nobody ever checks his work anyway.

7. Tell me about a time you disagreed with your foreman. What happened?

• Strong: said his piece once, did it the foreman's way unless it was unsafe, and kept working. If it was unsafe, he stopped and said so.
• Weak: walked off, or never says anything to anyone.

8. What kind of work do you want more of?

Commercial TI, ground-up, industrial, data center, service. There's no wrong answer. A man who wants gear and controls work on a job that's all devices and trim won't stay long.

9. What would make you leave a job before it's done?

Listen for pay, hours, per diem, a bad foreman or getting short-termed. Then think about whether your job does any of those. The phone screen questions that flag a one-month hand dig into this more.

04Code questions (name the edition)

Code section numbers move between NEC editions, so a code question has to say which edition you work to. In a Mike Holt Forum thread on placement tests, the parallel conductor rule is cited as 310.10(H), its number in the 2011 NEC. In the 2023 NEC it's 310.10(G). The numbers below are from the 2023 NEC. Check which edition your state and your AHJ enforce, and change the numbers to match.

Score code answers on the same 1 to 5 sheet. A J-man who knows the answer and says "it's in 310, I'd look up the table" gets most of the credit. A J-man who gets it wrong with total confidence gets less than the one who says he'd check.

Don't let the code section sink a good hand who's rusty on paper. Forum contractors who run written tests say the same: keep it plain, one right answer per question, partial credit where it's close.

05Character counts as much as skill

You can teach a J-man your way of running a job. You can't easily teach him to show up. One contractor on the Mike Holt Forum put it this way: "You should be able to teach the employee skills they need, but it is tougher to change their character."

Questions 4, 6 and 7 are there for that reason. Weight them. A 5 on bending and a 1 on the apprentice question is a no.

06What you can't ask

Keep every question about the work. The FTC and EEOC put it plainly: "Don't ask any medical questions before a conditional job offer has been made" (FTC and EEOC guidance). That includes "Any injuries? Bad back?" Ask instead whether he can do the physical tasks of the job, described plainly, with or without accommodation.

Stay off age, family plans, religion, national origin and the like. Keep your interview sheets at least one year; the same page says hiring records must be kept for one year after they're made, and longer if a discrimination charge is filed. Rules vary by state, so talk to your employment lawyer if you're unsure about a question.

07Then test it with his hands

An interview tells you how he talks about the work. A short practical tells you whether he can do it. Bend an offset and a 90, troubleshoot a planted fault on a board, terminate to a torque value. The 30-minute skills test for electricians lays one out.

Interviewing a foreman or lead instead? Use different questions: crew size, lookaheads, change orders and the GC's super. Those are in interview questions for an electrical foreman.

If you need hands faster than you can interview them, apply here and we'll see if we can put 5 licensed electricians in front of you in 14 days.

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