Best Operations Manager Interview Questions and Answers

Operations manager also called as Operation Executive have functions that are involved in all aspects of the company operations with having an overall goal to provide and support the operations effectively.

Their main role is to monitor the work of different departments within a company or it could be a group of companies and organizations.

Their daily tasks mainly involve to plan human and technical resource usage, manage the day to day tasks and design policies to keep all in place.

For this they need to be highly trained and highly qualified professionals as it includes complex responsibilities.

Operations Manager Interview Questions:

Before the start of the interview, you will need to determine what is that you are looking for.

Operations manager main role deals with maintaining and make sure that all operations in the company run smoothly.

Operations Manager Duties and Responsibilities: 

The main duties of operation managers is that of planning, handling and correlate all the day to day activities in an organization.

This helps to enhance effectiveness, performance and also productivity of the firm you are working for.

Also, operations managers are responsible for all the things relating to logistics to resource managing and a few other things too.

When interviewing a candidate for an operations manager, you need to check his experience and knowledge regarding the work.

Interpersonal skills are the most important and looked after feature in the role of operations manager.

Some of the Operational and Situational questions,

• Describe the common daily tasks for an Operations Manager.
• What is your experience with logistics management?
• Which Management Information Systems have you previously used?
• Have you ever made a report about production costs, which method did you use?
• What does successful communication mean to you when dealing with different organizational functions/departments?
• We want to ensure our confidential data is stored in a secure place. How would you cooperate with our IT team to achieve this?
• How does support services contribute to achieving business goals? Explain with some examples.
• As per your opinion, which are the most important financial management best practices?
• Are you familiar with Cost Analysis tools? Mention any statistical tools you have experience working with.
• Have you ever negotiated contracts with vendors? What’s the most effective approach?
• What is budget planning and how do you handle it step-by-step?

Behavioural Questions:

• Have you ever successfully executed a cost-cutting strategy?
• How do you manage 1:1 employee meetings?
• What’s your experience in making presentations?
• Last team strength you worked with and what problems did you face?

Other General Questions:

• Why would you be a good fit for your organization?
• What if you receive a better offer from another company?
• Why do you want to leave your current job?
• What do you see yourself doing in 10 years?
• What is the difference between productivity and efficiency?
• How would you sell to a defaulting consumer
• Why do you want to leave your current job and join us?
• Why some businesses fail and others succeed?
• Can you handle union meetings in the workplace?
• Why you want to shift into a different sector?
• Why do you want to move from an urban area to the semi-urban area?
• What will you give to our company in the next one year?
• What do you expect from this job?
• Why you want to leave your previous organization
• How do you handle the pressure
• How will you handle the team’s attendance issues & Attrition’s
• Explain how you achieve your targets?
• Have you ever fired anyone? How did you handle it?
• Walk me through your resume
• Why do you want to join the banking sector
• Why should we not hire you

To recruit such a person for your company or group of companies, you will need to frame questions that will help to make the correct choice or selection.

The interview questions need to be structured in such a way that it will be consistent for all the candidates. It has to lead to more accurate information of desired experiences and behaviours. Of course, it should not be biased in any way.

1) As an Operations Head, what sort of tasks were your handling daily?
How do you make decisions when it comes to staffing, warehousing, accounting, operations, sales?

If you were to answer, you would be listing out the various tasks. But try to provide examples with each task that you were involved in. This will help the employer know, to what level your functions were.

For example, if you were involved in arranging resources, then you could say preparing budgets for various programs and ensuring that it was put to complete use.

If you are part of logistics then you could say taking control of inventory and logistics. If you got involved in human resources especially hiring then say as conducting job interviews till the final stage.

Mostly as Operations head, then you could say handling process controls and being employee’s supervisor.

2) How was your involvement with each employee in the organization?,
Have you personally hired, trained and coached staff?,
Have you fired staff for erratic behavior? What steps did you follow to do that?
How do you motivate your employees?

Having to deal with people is quite a tough job and being an Operations head you would have used various methods to bring in discipline, frame office regulations, deal with small conflicts within teams.

It’s always implied that conflicts or grievances are mostly taken up to the level of Operations head. You could describe the way you had to handle erratic behaviours and ways that you had to impose discipline to bring in the culture so that teamwork does not fail.

Detail out the way you had been attentive and had closed the communication gaps.

3) What do you think is the skill set you need to possess to be successful?
Describe your management style or philosophy.

Operation Manager needs to be quick in thinking and also implementing the aspects that need a solution.

In fact, it is having the ability to solve problems quickly and use your communication effectively to lead the team. These important aspects need to be explained with examples.

For instance, you would have managed changes and dealt with all levels of people using your leadership quality and communications skill. You could emphasize your job skills wherein you would have been involved in communicating the instructions to subcontractors and conveying messages to other levels within the organization.

4) What methods do you employ to communicate your message? How do you do it?
What is your experience in making presentations?

Operations Head need to be equipped with making presentations as it is the best method to display to the inside and outside part of the organization.

As they are constantly posed with displaying the progress of the company or any new projects and/or future expansions that are envisaged, this part of communication skill is best utilized in this aspect.

You will need to have some sample work projects that you had developed to give as examples. Indicate the methodology that you have employed to make the message clear.

5) How do you manage budgets? At your previous employer, what steps did you take to cut costs?

Head of Operations carries out tasks bearing in mind the budget restraints. He/she will be involved in budgeting for all the departments and also review to see how much is utilized and how much is remaining. From that, they will decide on making the purchase based on the restraint.

Their aim is to know where to cut costs and where it is needed. Future resource planning is also in their job scope.

Hence, you will need to revive all the work executed with examples to showcase your skill in managing within budget. Sometimes Operations Manager is involved in procuring loans for the company. In case you had been involved make it clear about the type of loan depicting the examples.

6) Have you participated in negotiating contracts from small or large vendors? How do go about it and have you succeeded?

As Operations head, your job also involves in getting a job or project executed within budget. For this, you would have to get help from an outside source for which you would have to be good at negotiation.

This skill is aptly executed when you are sound in that field or subject or else take advice from other department heads. You could give examples of what contracts have you successfully negotiated.

7) How do you solve a problem that arises? How do you act on it? Do you pause and think or act immediately?

Many problems would arise in the daily work environment whether it is a manufacturing unit or service sector. Being in charge of it, you would be involved in handling problems on a daily basis.

Take out some good examples of how you acted on it. Most of the time employers would be interested to know if you involved the team members to discuss the issue and get solutions.

Usually, Operations in charge gets to the core of the issue by using their six sigma skill and other management styles. For this, it requires a brainstorming session with the team who would bring out the solutions and does not decide by himself.

8) Have you handled Management Information Systems or Cost Analysis or variance Analysis?

From this question, it is obvious, that it is posed to know whether you are familiar with the technical aspects required for your job.

Sometimes you might not have complete knowledge about it, as you would have some expert handling it. In such cases, you could indicate how you handled them. But you could show your eagerness to harness that field as well. On the other side, if you had the opportunity to explore that section, do indicate the details.

9) What in your terms is ideal operations management team?

Mostly Operations head must be like-minded. But you could indicate what kind of people you would like to work with.

You could say that you intend to work with result-driven people and surround yourself with self-motivated people who work in a team towards a common goal.

Most of all you like to be surrounded by positive thinking people. You could cite examples where how one of your best projects went well with the team members’ details.

10) How big was the team you had last worked with? What were the difficulties you had to face? How did you manage them?

Operations Managers are always working with teams. Team members should be motivated and appraised during situations whenever required.

Here the operations head handles his /her team with ease using their management skill. You could explain the details of the team that you had handled wherein how you moved within the team by walking the talk showing them the details. Also, you could tell what the most difficult situation was where you had to take the call and smoothen out.

Here you display your method of planning, leadership skills, communications skill, ability to address a group, know how to resolve problems. Take care when you answer this particular section of the interview question.

Competency-based interviews are conducted to find out a lot about the candidates. The interviews then need to be based on bringing out the nature and attitudes of the candidates. If the interview is to select Operations Manager then questions need to be based on the context given above.

As management positions require core competencies that will bring success, the interview is conducted to explore the competencies and their behaviors.

But the basic knowledge requirements for a manager are on business and management principles, operating systems, information processing applications, planning tools, human resource management principles, relevant software applications, and administrating procedures.

Operations Manager Salaries: 

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Operations Manager Salaries by Location:

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Operations Manager are key pivots in the organization as they need to be effective in using resources at the same time taking care of the customer, organizational, and staff needs. It’s a balancing act that is most needed.