Hiring your startup’s first operations manager (or head of operations / operations director) isn’t easy but it’s critical to achieving your vision. I’ve learned from experience by hiring dozens of talented people into startup operations roles.
Like any hiring process, if not well executed it can be a frustrating experience for candidates and founders alike. The difference between hiring the best ops person or not usually comes down to thorough planning and managing expectations.
Now you’ve put your tailored job description out there and hopefully have some quality applicants lined up, you need to work out which have the skills and potential to do the role.
Forget CV filtering, you need a tailored job assessment
Do I really need a job assessment to find an operations manager?
Put the question in a different context and the answer will become apparent. For instance:
- Would you buy a car without taking it for a test drive?
- Would you marry someone based on a pleasant first date?
- Would you let someone cut you open because they wrote “surgeon” on a sheet of paper?
In my experience CVs are next to useless when hiring for startup operations roles. On the one hand I’ve seen people hire paper hotshots who crashed and burned on the job because they hadn’t been tested under pressure. On the other hand I’ve hired people with very modest CVs who went on to be high flying operations managers… but only because I’d evaluated their potential in advance. Unless going for a friendly chat over a matcha latte reflects a typical day’s work at your startup (lucky you!), you’re going to need that assessment.
Pick out the key skills from the job description
If you haven’t yet written a detailed job description, go back to step 1 to see how.
Drawing on your job description, you’ll probably find you’re looking for a range of hard skills like data analysis, operations management or process design, as well as soft skills like leadership, communication or strategic thinking. Plus probably some less tangible attributes like integrity. Which skills or attributes are hard, soft or whatever else isn’t set in stone but categorising them will help focus your assessment design process.
Choose a suitable format to assess each skill
Now you need to figure out how best to assess each of the required skills. For example:
- Data analysis – 30 minutes of Excel or Sheets problems related to your order patterns.
- Strategic thinking – 15 minutes to prepare a 5 minute pitch to “potential investors”.
- Communication – a 5 minute Q&A on the pitch, testing more dynamic communication.
As you can see, it’s often possible to assess more than one skill with the same test. It’s important to get as much feedback as possible on each candidate in the minimum time possible. 1-2 hours should be more than sufficient to thoroughly assess a candidate’s skills. If your assessment takes any longer than that it will probably put potential applicants off and become onerous for you and your team to evaluate.
Start the job assessment from the application stage
Don’t miss out on opportunities to assess candidates from the very first touch point. The worst thing you can do is ask candidates to apply just by sharing their CV. You’re likely to filter out candidates for the wrong reasons and waste time arranging interviews with others who aren’t seriously interested in the role.
My preference is to use a brief application form with a handful of questions to gauge the applicant’s interest and suitability. For example:
- Explain your interest in this role in no more than 50 words.
- Give an example of a time you faced a major operational challenge.
- How would you describe your leadership style?
Time-wasters who send their generic CV to a thousand companies probably won’t apply. More importantly, for those who do apply you’ll have some insight into their way of thinking before you even come to speak to them. You may not need or want to filter any candidates out at this stage but you can refer back to their answers when it comes to interviews.
Design your bespoke operations manager job assessment
Your startup and the role you’re hiring for are unique, so too should be your job assessment. You may be able to find suitable templates online but at the least you’ll need to modify the content, questions, data, design, etc. Creating a tailored assessment that reflects your company’s business model, values and ways of working will give you much more useful results than copy-pasting a generic template.
The key here is to draw on the different skillsets and experiences already in your team, since it’s unlikely you’ll be able to do it all really well yourself unless your background is in operations – and even then you may not have the time to do it justice. Alternatively, you can engage an advisor to lead the hiring process end-to-end for you, including all the nuts and bolts of writing the job description, designing the assessment and managing interviews.