A route-planner work sample for a live opening

A route-planner applicant can submit a tidy map that hides an impossible schedule. Two deliveries may have fixed receiving windows, a van may be full before the second stop, or a driver may reach a site only if every optimistic travel estimate holds. A route-planner work sample for a live opening should make those constraints visible. The reviewer needs to see why the plan is feasible, where it could fail, and how the candidate would respond when a key assumption changes.

This guide uses a Route Planner posting hosted by Top Drawer Talent and naming Superior Express Ltd, observed on October 21, 2026. The recruiter page described daily delivery-route optimization, vehicle utilization, driver scheduling, disruption response, customer and internal communication, transport records, and route-data analysis. It called for prior planning or logistics-coordination experience and proficiency with route-planning software, transport-management systems, and Microsoft Office. It is a recruiter-hosted posting for a Dublin South role, not a Delpack vacancy. The page did not request a work sample or specify the two timed stops used below. The sample is a clearly hypothetical exercise to show how an applicant could demonstrate the listed skills if asked.

Read the planning criteria before drawing routes

Extract the planning criteria from the current posting. For this role, a work sample should connect delivery schedules to vehicle use, driver assignments, disruption handling, communication, and accurate records. A shorter total distance may be attractive, but distance alone does not prove service if it sends a van beyond capacity or after a customer's receiving cutoff. Write the role's criteria in a margin and return to them when explaining the plan.

Confirm the opening still exists before using it as an application target. The recruiter page showed an “apply now” path during research, but its availability may change. Check the title, employer, location, and instructions on the day of submission. Do not send an unsolicited route map containing actual customers, driver details, or confidential delivery data. If an employer requests a sample, use the provided data or a clearly invented dataset.

The posting mentions software proficiency without naming a product. A candidate should identify systems they have really used and describe the planning tasks completed in them. “Expert in all TMS platforms” is an unsupported claim for most applicants. A spreadsheet can communicate the logic of a hypothetical exercise, but it does not establish experience with a particular transport-management system. Keep tool experience and planning judgment as separate claims.

The role also calls for previous route-planning, transport-planning, or logistics-coordination experience. A work sample can show how you think; it does not replace a truthful account of that experience. Describe your actual prior responsibilities and the scale of work you handled. If you coordinated schedules but did not create routes yourself, say so and explain the parts you owned.

State the hypothetical route constraint and assumptions

Here is an invented route constraint set. Two vans leave a depot at 8:00 a.m. Each can carry ten load units, and every assigned driver has enough scheduled working time for the short routes in this exercise. Stop P requires four units and receives between 9:00 and 9:30 a.m.; Stop Q requires five units and receives between 10:00 and 10:30 a.m. Each takes fifteen minutes to serve. Two untimed stops, R and S, require three and four units respectively. These units are placeholders for a consistent capacity measure, not real vehicle weights or legal load limits.

Assume estimated travel from the depot to P is 35 minutes, P to Q is 40 minutes, and the depot to Q directly is 45 minutes. The other stop travel times need separate estimates before they can be inserted into a complete dispatch plan. A candidate should label these numbers as assumptions, include the source of each estimate when using real data, and account for traffic, parking, access, loading, and service time. The fictional numbers do not establish any real Dublin route.

Begin with a load check. P plus Q equals nine units, so the two timed stops can fit on one ten-unit van. R plus S equals seven units, so they can fit on the second van by capacity. That arithmetic is necessary but not sufficient: a plan also needs feasible time windows, actual travel estimates for R and S, and any site or vehicle restrictions. The applicant should leave the untimed route provisional until those details are known instead of pretending that capacity proves the whole day works.

Van 1 could leave at 8:00 a.m., reach P at 8:35, wait for its 9:00 opening, complete fifteen minutes of service by 9:15, and reach Q at 9:55. It would wait five minutes for Q to open, then finish there around 10:15. This plan has 15 minutes of slack before Q's 10:30 cutoff after the assumed service time. It is feasible under the invented inputs, but a delay greater than that margin can defeat the second appointment. State the margin instead of calling the route “guaranteed.”

Explain the vehicle assignment tradeoff

The vehicle assignment gives Van 1 both timed stops and leaves Van 2 to cover R and S after their travel times and access conditions are checked. This protects one vehicle from a route whose capacity would exceed ten units. It also concentrates the two firm customer windows on one driver, so the risk of a delay at P carries through to Q. A candidate should say why that tradeoff is acceptable under the current assumptions and what alternative they would test.

An alternative is to assign P and Q to separate vans. That removes the dependency between the two windows, but it may increase travel and may complicate coverage of R and S. The exercise has not supplied enough travel and service data to score that alternative completely. A careful work sample can compare the known advantages and identify the missing figures rather than invent a winning route. Real optimization balances service, capacity, travel, driver availability, and the cost of recovery.

The candidate should also check vehicle and driver eligibility. Could either van carry each load type? Are there height, access, or equipment restrictions? Do the drivers have the necessary authorization and duty time? Are there mandated breaks or local transport rules? The observed posting calls for compliant routing, but the fictional exercise does not supply the facts needed to certify regulatory compliance. Mark those checks as pending in the sample, and never claim a route is legally cleared from a map alone.

Use a small table or a clear sequence in the work sample: departure, arrival, service start, service end, load remaining, and time-window margin. An interviewer should be able to inspect the calculations without guessing. If the application accepts only prose, state the same sequence in sentences. A visual map can help orient the reader, but the decision rests on the constraints and the arithmetic.

Keep the time convention consistent throughout the sheet. An arrival before a receiving window is a waiting period, not an early completed delivery. A planned service end at the cutoff leaves no recovery time for a queue, signature, or loading problem. If a route-planning tool reports drive time but omits service time, add the latter explicitly. The candidate can include a column for the source and timestamp of each travel estimate, so a reviewer knows which figures came from route software and which were placeholders in the exercise.

Show a disruption response when P runs late

A useful disruption response is part of the sample because the posting names route disruptions and delays. Suppose the driver reaches P on time but cannot begin service until 9:20 a.m. The fifteen-minute service ends at 9:35. With the assumed 40-minute trip, Van 1 reaches Q at about 10:15 and finishes at 10:30, exactly at the stated cutoff. There is no remaining time buffer. The planner should treat that as a risk, not as a comfortable recovery.

If P slips to a 9:30 service start, it ends at 9:45. Van 1 would reach Q at 10:25 and finish around 10:40, ten minutes beyond the invented receiving window. The candidate should not quietly move the cutoff or erase service time to save the plan. They should contact the affected operations and customer contacts through the approved process, confirm whether Q can accept a later delivery, and test whether Van 2 could take Q without disrupting its other assignments or exceeding capacity.

That rescue is only a candidate option. Van 2's actual location, available capacity after any loads, travel time to Q, equipment, driver eligibility, and transfer process are all unknown. Before recommending a transfer, calculate those details and obtain any required approval. If no feasible recovery exists, communicate an honest revised ETA and record the service exception. The sample should demonstrate a decision path, not promise an unavailable spare van.

A route-planner work sample should say what would trigger a replan. A delay at P is one trigger; a vehicle fault, missed pickup, new customer restriction, or changed traffic condition could be another. The planner should monitor the route against the schedule and update the decision when the facts change. The recruiter posting's reference to fleet performance and route-data analysis supports this monitoring focus, although it does not prescribe a particular alert threshold or software workflow.

Document the route record and communicate changes

Keep a route record that separates inputs, estimates, decisions, and outcomes. For the invented plan, record the two vans, the ten-unit capacity assumption, each stop's units and receiving window, service duration, travel estimates, and the selected assignment. If P actually starts late, record the observed time and the revised Q estimate. A later reviewer can then tell whether the plan failed because the estimate was weak, a site changed its conditions, or the response was slow.

Communication should follow the decision. Drivers need an authorized and clear route update. Internal dispatch and customer service need the reason, affected stops, revised ETA, and next decision point. The customer needs a truthful arrival estimate or a request to accept a revised time. A work sample should not invent that the planner personally contacts every customer if the employer assigns that duty to another team. It can describe how the information would reach the right owner.

Close the loop with actual performance measures. Did both timed stops occur within their windows? What distance and time did the route consume? Was capacity used as expected? How much of the planned buffer was lost? A single fictional exercise cannot prove a candidate's real performance, but it can show what they would compare after the day. If the candidate has authentic historical planning results, they can present them separately with dates and honest measurement methods.

Keep the sample lean enough for the requested format. One input sheet, one feasible base assignment, one tested disruption, and a brief explanation are usually more useful than a complicated map with undocumented assumptions. If the employer gives its own constraints, discard the invented numbers and solve the supplied case. If it requests no sample, use this exercise for interview preparation rather than uploading it without invitation.

Check the final work sample against the opening

Before submission, read the current recruiter posting again. Does the sample demonstrate route creation, vehicle use, driver scheduling, delay response, cross-team communication, and accurate records? Does it accurately identify software you used? Does it distinguish the hypothetical inputs from employer facts? Can someone reproduce the calculation from the written assumptions? Those questions are more valuable than adding another unverified efficiency percentage.

The observed role was in Dublin South through a recruiter, and the exact employer and application instructions should be confirmed before a candidate applies. Delpack's Fort Wayne driver guide hub and driver careers page concern a different company and job path; neither validates this route-planner opening. A route-planner work sample for a live opening succeeds when the candidate exposes the real planning tradeoff, makes the time and capacity math inspectable, and changes course honestly when a constraint breaks.