Seventeen chalets inside the UNESCO Matobo Hills, an hour from Bulawayo, and everything the lodge runs on comes up that road. This is the working part of the application, and it is built around the buying you would actually be doing.
Write the answers yourself. Use a dictionary or a spellchecker if you want to, we are not marking your grammar. But the words need to be yours, and here is why that is in your interest rather than just ours.
Every written answer you give here gets printed and read back to you at interview. You will be asked to go further into it: who you spoke to, what the figure was, what happened next, what you would do differently. That conversation is where we decide, and a candidate who cannot talk about their own answer does not get past it. It is a short conversation and it is not a pleasant one.
So a rough four sentences that are clearly yours will get you further than a polished paragraph that could have been written about any lodge anywhere. We are reading for what you have actually done, not how well it is phrased.
Nothing here has a trick in it. The situations have no single right answer, and we are looking at how you order things rather than whether you guessed what we wanted.
All of it is used, and none of it is optional. This job holds the lodge's cash and decides who gets paid, so we ask more here than most employers do.
Buying experience
Practicalities
References and CV
Ten sets of four statements. In each set, mark the one most like you and the one least like you. All four will usually sound reasonable, and that is deliberate. We want to know what you put first when you cannot have everything, not whether you agree with good practice.
Six situations, each of which has happened here or somewhere close to it. Rank all four responses from 1, what you would do first, to 4, what you would do last or not at all. Part marks are given for a sensible order, and the options appear in a different order for every candidate.
This is the part that tells us most, and the part we will read back to you. Keep the writing short. Three or four lines in your own words beats a paragraph.
Six things land on you inside the same five minutes. Number them 1 to 6 in the order you deal with them.
The lodge uses 300 litres of cooking oil a month.
Supplier A sells 20-litre drums at USD 35.00 each and delivers free. Supplier B sells 5-litre bottles at USD 8.00 each, plus USD 60 delivery on the order.
A butchery you have used for two years has short-delivered three times in a fortnight, each time a few kilos under the invoiced weight. Nobody has signed a credit note. Their meat is good and you would rather keep them. Write the message you would send them.
Describe something you bought better, renegotiated, or stopped paying for. Include the actual figure, roughly, and how you could show it had worked.
Go back into anything you want to change. Once you send it, it is with us.
We read every one of these properly, which takes time. If your application is going forward you will hear from us within ten working days.
If you have not heard by then, assume we have gone another way this season. Do keep an eye on the careers page, because we recruit through the year and we keep the ones we liked.
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