Nobody in the room is going to say the word “license.”

You will be asked about your availability, your last job, whether you can lift fifty pounds, and what you know about terpenes. You will answer all of it well. Underneath every one of those questions there is a different question, and the person across the table will not put it to you directly.

Minnesota wrote that question into statute. It is one clause long.

Here is the clause, and here is what it makes every cannabis interview in this state actually about.

Minn. Stat. 342.151, subdivision 2, opens with a sentence about headcount and finishes with a sentence about you.

Read the second half slowly. At all times. Every individual. Good conduct.

There is no state badge for you to stand behind, and that is the entire point. We said it in our guide to reading a job posting and it still holds: Minnesota issues no general cannabis worker credential. The trade the statute makes instead is plain. The state runs one criminal history check on you and otherwise does not vet you individually, and in exchange the business carries your conduct on its own license, for as long as it holds one.

What “accountable” costs, in dollars and in doors. Minn. Stat. 342.19, subdivision 5, lets the Office of Cannabis Management issue an administrative order requiring a business to correct a violation or cease and desist, and, for each violation of the chapter or its rules, a monetary penalty of up to $10,000, an amount that deprives the business of any economic advantage gained by the violation, or both. Minn. Stat. 342.21, subdivision 1, lets the office revoke or decline to renew a license when it has cause to believe the business violated an ownership or operational requirement, after written notice and at least 20 days before a hearing. Subdivision 3 lets the office suspend a license for up to 90 days with no hearing at all if continuing to operate would threaten the health or safety of any person, and extend that by another 90 days where it has given notice of intent to revoke and the hearing has not yet happened.

That is the exposure sitting in the chair opposite you, and it is why the interview feels heavier than the job description reads.

You think you are asking them for a job. They are deciding whether to put their license behind your name.

A reference vouches for you once. A license holder vouches for you every shift.

Student feedback

Five questions you will hear, and the rule sitting underneath each one. Answer the rule and you will sound like someone who has already worked here.

“Tell me about a time you followed a procedure you thought was pointless.” Underneath: Minn. Rules 9810.1100, subpart 2, which requires written, up-to-date standard operating procedures covering eleven subjects, available on-site to all personnel and to the office on request. Translation: will you follow a written procedure on a slow Tuesday when nobody is watching. Answer with a specific instance and the reason you followed it anyway. The wrong answer is a story about being right.

“The count is off at close. Walk me through it.” Underneath: Minn. Rules 9810.1302, which requires the business to update the system inventory and ensure its accuracy at the end of each business day, and requires theft or loss to be reported to the office within eight hours of discovering it, with local law enforcement notified immediately. Translation: how many minutes pass between you noticing and someone senior knowing. The answer they are listening for is a small number.

“A regular you like hands you an expired license.” Underneath: Minn. Stat. 342.27, which sets the acceptable forms of identification, any one of which is enough, and bars sale to a person who is visibly intoxicated. Translation: will you spend your own social capital on a stranger’s behalf. Say no warmly, and say it quickly.

“How do you feel about being recorded all day?” Underneath: Minn. Rules 9810.1500, the camera coverage, the retention period, and the badge whose visual coding announces which activities you may perform and which areas you may enter. Translation: does surveillance read to you as suspicion or as infrastructure. Both answers are human. Only one of them makes the next two years pleasant.

“Why cannabis?” Underneath: nothing. This is the one question with no rule behind it, which is exactly why it is the one people fail. Enthusiasm for the product is the easiest thing in the room to find and the least useful thing to sell. Every applicant has it. Answer with the work instead.

Criminal history has a timing rule, and cannabis employers may sit outside it. Minn. Stat. 364.021, paragraph (a), says a public or private employer may not inquire into or consider or require disclosure of the criminal record or criminal history of an applicant for employment until the applicant has been selected for an interview by the employer or, if there is not an interview, before a conditional offer of employment is made. Paragraph (b) then says the section does not apply to the Department of Corrections or to employers who have a statutory duty to conduct a criminal history background check or otherwise take into consideration a potential employee’s criminal history during the hiring process.

A cannabis business has exactly that duty, under the subdivision we opened with.

Paragraph (c) is worth knowing too: nothing in the section stops an employer from telling applicants up front that the law or its own policy disqualifies particular criminal histories from particular positions. An employer who posts that is complying, not overreaching.

We are not going to resolve that for you, because we cannot. We found no Minnesota court decision or attorney general opinion applying paragraph (b) to a cannabis business, we are not lawyers, and nothing in this guide is legal advice. What we can tell you is the practical shape of it: expect the question, expect it early, and know that the eight-crime list in 342.151, subdivision 3, paragraph (a), is the list of convictions that disqualifies you by statute rather than by rule.

Your pay history is off the table, and the statute is not where you would think to look. It is not in chapter 181. It is Minn. Stat. 363A.08, subdivision 8, inside the Human Rights Act, and it says an employer shall not inquire into, consider, or require disclosure from any source the pay history of an applicant for employment for the purpose of determining that applicant’s compensation. Paragraph (c) preserves your right to volunteer it “voluntarily and without asking, encouraging, or prompting,” and lets an employer act on what you volunteer only to support a wage higher than the one it first offered. Paragraph (e) leaves the employer free to tell you what the job pays and to ask what you are looking for.

They may ask what you want. They may not ask what you were paid.

If the business has thirty or more employees, the number should already have been in the posting. Minn. Stat. 181.173, enacted in 2024, requires an employer to disclose in each posting for each job opening the starting salary range and a general description of all of the benefits and other compensation, including any health or retirement benefits. A range may not be open ended, and an employer that does not plan to offer a range must list a fixed pay rate. The catch is in the definition: “employer” there means a person or entity that employs thirty or more employees at one or more sites in Minnesota. Many Minnesota cannabis businesses are below that threshold, and for them this section simply does not apply. Check the specific employer rather than assuming.

This is the question we get more than any other, and the answer has two halves that people keep collapsing into one.

For most positions, an employer may not make you take a cannabis test to get hired. Minn. Stat. 181.951, subdivision 8, paragraph (a): an employer must not request or require a job applicant to undergo cannabis testing as a condition of employment unless otherwise required by state or federal law. Paragraph (b) adds that, unless state or federal law requires otherwise, an employer must not refuse to hire an applicant solely because the applicant submits to an authorized test and the result indicates the presence of cannabis.

Then there is subdivision 9, which is the half that matters in this industry. For seven categories of position, cannabis and its metabolites are treated as a drug and are subject to the ordinary testing provisions: a safety-sensitive position; a peace officer position; a firefighter position; a position requiring face-to-face care, training, education, supervision, counseling, consultation or medical assistance to children, to vulnerable adults, or to patients receiving health care services; a position requiring a commercial driver’s license or requiring an employee to operate a motor vehicle for which state or federal law requires drug or alcohol testing; a position funded by a federal grant; and any other position for which state or federal law requires cannabis testing of an applicant or employee.

“Safety-sensitive” is a definition, not a job title, and the employer applies it first. Minn. Stat. 181.950, subdivision 13, defines a safety-sensitive position as a job, including any supervisory or management position, in which an impairment caused by drug, alcohol or cannabis usage would threaten the health or safety of any person. Whether a particular cultivation, manufacturing, delivery or retail role meets that definition is a determination the employer makes about that role. We will not make it for them, and we will not make it for you. Ask in the interview and get the answer before the offer rather than after it.

Where testing is lawful, the offer has to come first. Minn. Stat. 181.951, subdivision 2, lets an employer request or require an applicant to undergo drug and alcohol testing only where a job offer has already been made, and only where the same test is requested or required of every applicant conditionally offered employment for that position. A test before an offer is not a stricter employer. It is a different thing entirely.

And one positive strip does not end it. Minn. Stat. 181.953 carries the safeguards, and they are worth knowing before you need them. Subdivision 11 says an employer may not withdraw a conditional offer based on a positive result from an initial screening test that has not been verified by a confirmatory test. Subdivision 6 gives you a form acknowledging the employer’s testing policy before any test, written notice of the right to explain a positive result, and three working days after notice of a confirmed positive to submit an explanation, with a confirmatory retest of the original sample available at your own expense. Subdivision 4 bars an employer from testing you at a laboratory it owns and operates. And under Minn. Stat. 181.952 none of it may happen at all except under a written testing policy.

Registry patients have a separate protection with its own edges. Minn. Stat. 342.57, subdivision 5, says that unless a failure to do so would violate federal or state law or regulations, or cause the employer to lose a monetary or licensing-related benefit under federal law or regulations, an employer may not discriminate against a person in hiring, termination, or any term or condition of employment based on enrollment in the registry program, status as a Tribal medical cannabis program patient, or a patient’s positive test for cannabis components or metabolites. That last protection does not apply where the patient used, possessed, sold, transported or was impaired on work premises, during working hours, or while operating the employer’s machinery, vehicle or equipment. Subdivision 5a requires fourteen days’ written notice, citing the specific federal law or regulation at issue, before an employer takes an action the section prohibits. Subdivision 6a bars retaliation for asserting any of it.

Everything above is about what they may ask. This part is about what you say.

Minn. Stat. 342.151, subdivision 3, has two paragraphs. Paragraph (a) is the eight-felony list: human trafficking, noncannabis controlled substance crimes in the first or second degree, labor trafficking, fraud, embezzlement, extortion, money laundering, insider trading. It closes with a clause that gets skipped and should not be — the bar applies where the crime was committed in this state or any other jurisdiction “for which a full pardon or similar relief has not been granted.” If you have been pardoned, that sentence is about you.

Paragraph (b) is one sentence long.

No list. No look-back period. No seriousness threshold.

And no set-aside. The Office of Cannabis Management does hold a set-aside power, at Minn. Stat. 342.15, subdivision 3, where it finds a person has shown they do not pose a risk of harm. It reaches disqualifications the office adopts by rule under 342.15, subdivision 2. It does not reach the statutory bars in 342.151.

The eight crimes in paragraph (a) are things that happened to a person years ago, often before the law that now names them existed. Paragraph (b) is something a person does at a kitchen table on a Tuesday night, in a hurry, to make a gap in a résumé look smaller.

The one wrong answer that can disqualify you is not an unimpressive one. It is a false one.

Say the gap out loud, and say the conviction out loud if it is on a check that has already been ordered. Under subdivision 2, the business submits your fingerprints and your written consent to the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension before hiring you, the bureau decides whether you are qualified to be employed as a cannabis worker, and the bureau notifies the business of what it decided. An employer who hears it from you is evaluating a person. An employer who reads it on a return from the BCA after hearing something else is evaluating a discrepancy.

Two eligibility facts to have straight before you sit down. Minn. Stat. 342.24, subdivision 1, paragraph (a), bars a cannabis business from employing anyone under 21 and from contracting with anyone under 21 whose scope of work involves handling cannabis plants, flower, artificially derived cannabinoids or cannabinoid products. Whether that handling qualifier reaches the employment half of the sentence as well as the contracting half is not settled on the face of the text, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. Assume the bar applies to you and ask. Paragraph (b) of the same subdivision keeps anyone under 21 off the premises entirely unless they are enrolled in the registry program, which answers the follow-up question most people have.

And subdivision 8 of that section excludes hemp businesses from its requirements, which is one more reason to know whether the posting in front of you is for a cannabis business or a lower-potency hemp edible retailer. They are different license categories with different rules underneath them.

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An interview where only one side asks questions is not an interview, it is a screening. These four are short, and each one tells you something the job description will not.

“Is this position designated safety-sensitive, and does anything else on the subdivision 9 list apply to it?” Ask both halves. Safety-sensitive is only the first of seven categories, and a clean “no” to it settles nothing on its own — a commercial driver’s license, a federally grant-funded position, or any role state or federal law requires cannabis testing for each puts testing back on the table by itself.

“Does the business hold the edible cannabinoid product handler endorsement, and does this role touch unpackaged edibles?” Under Minn. Stat. 342.07, subdivision 3, that endorsement belongs to the license holder, not to you. Asking it correctly signals that you already know the difference between a credential you hold and a credential your employer holds.

“What happens here when a count does not balance?” You will learn the culture in one answer. A business that says “we find it, we log it, we call it in” is describing 9810.1302. A business that laughs is describing something else.

“Who do I call at nine at night, and what happens to the person who calls?” The second half is the real question. In a building where a problem has an eight-hour clock on it, the cost of raising your hand is the single most load-bearing fact about the workplace.

We are not lawyers and none of this is legal advice. It is a reading guide to public statutes and rules, written so that you can go read them yourself. Every link above goes to the primary source.

We could not resolve how 364.021, paragraph (b), applies to a cannabis business. We would rather say that plainly than write a confident sentence and have you rely on it.

The safety-sensitive designation is not ours to make. We told you the definition and who applies it. We did not tell you which roles qualify, because that answer belongs to the employer and to the facts of the role.

We are not quoting pay, hiring timelines, or how long a background check takes. Those numbers move, and a stale figure does real damage to somebody making a decision with it.

Nothing here says an employer cannot ask about cannabis use. The statute we quoted is about testing. Those are different things, and the difference matters in a room where you are being asked to be candid.

Statutes, rules and agency guidance all change. Read the current versions before you rely on any of this, including this guide.

An interview is the last conversation in which you are still a stranger. Spend it being a legible one.

Say hello anytime: [email protected].

Minnesota Cannabis College is a Twin Cities-based 501(c)(3) nonprofit. Donations are tax-deductible as allowed by law. EIN 86-2319307.

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The MNCC Team

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