Hiring your first ops person: what to actually look for

The mistake in the job description

First ops hires are usually described in terms of processes: manage inventory, coordinate fulfilment, handle escalations, maintain the ops calendar. Then you hire someone who is genuinely good at running processes, and six months later you are still the one making every non-obvious call.

The reason is that in a store doing under about 5,000 orders a month, the processes are not the hard part. The hard part is the fifteen decisions a day that the process does not cover, most of which involve trading a small amount of money against a small amount of risk with incomplete information.

You are hiring for judgement. Here is how we interview for it.

Question one: the ambiguous refund

"A customer wants a refund eleven days outside our thirty-day window. They have ordered six times, never returned anything. The item is worth $178 and we cannot resell it. What do you do?"

You are not looking for yes or no. You are listening for whether they ask what the customer's lifetime value is, whether this is a pattern across other customers, and what our policy exists to protect against. A candidate who answers immediately in either direction is telling you they treat policy as the answer rather than as an input.

Question two: the conflicting information

"Shopify says you have twelve units. The warehouse says four. A customer has just ordered eight. What is your next hour?"

Good answers stop the bleeding first (pause the listing) and investigate second. Weaker answers start with the investigation, which is more intellectually satisfying and lets four more of a product you may not have sell in the meantime.

The very best answers ask whether this has happened before with this SKU, because a recurring discrepancy is a different problem from a one-off.

Question three: the thing they got wrong

"Tell me about an operational decision you made that turned out badly."

Everyone has one. What matters is whether they can describe it without either minimising it or performing contrition, and specifically, whether they can tell you what they now check that they did not check then. That last part is the whole signal. Judgement is mostly a list of things you have learned to check.

Ops experience is not years served. It is the length of that list.

What to weight lightly

• Tool familiarity. Anyone competent learns your stack in a fortnight. Do not filter on it.
• Category experience. Useful, not decisive. Fulfilment problems rhyme across categories.
• Team size managed. A first ops hire is usually managing nobody, and the skills are not the same.

The first thirty days

Whoever you hire, give them the escalations before you give them the processes. It is the fastest way for them to build the list, and the fastest way for you to find out whether the judgement is there before you have handed over anything expensive.

What the role actually is

Job adverts for store operations tend to list tools and tasks: process returns, manage inventory, coordinate fulfilment. All true, and none of it describes the job.

The job is making decisions with incomplete information, quickly, repeatedly, without anyone checking. A customer has a problem the policy does not cover. Stock says one thing and the shelf says another. Two things need doing and there is time for one.

Someone who is excellent at following a process and uncomfortable deciding without one will struggle, however organised they are. That is the distinction to hire for, and it is not what most interviews test.

Testing judgement rather than experience

Experience in ecommerce is useful and overrated as a filter. Someone who has run a busy cafe has made more real-time operational decisions than a candidate who spent two years in a large team following defined processes.

Describe a genuine situation from your own store with a real ambiguity in it, and ask what they would do. You are listening for three things: whether they ask what the constraints are before answering, whether they name a trade-off rather than pretending there is a clean answer, and whether they can say what would change their mind.

The last one is the strongest signal. Someone who can describe what evidence would flip their decision is thinking rather than performing confidence.

The scenario worth using

Ask about a decision they got wrong, and what they changed afterwards.

The answer separates candidates fast. Some cannot name one, which usually means either very little responsibility or an unwillingness to look at it. Some name a mistake that was somebody else's fault. The ones you want describe a decision, the reasoning at the time, what they missed, and the specific thing they now do differently.

That pattern is what operational competence actually looks like, and it is much harder to fake than a list of tools.

Setting them up to succeed

The most common way a good operations hire fails is being given the responsibility and not the authority. They are accountable for outcomes but have to ask before doing anything that costs money, so everything routes through the owner anyway and nothing improves.

Decide the limits before they start, write them down, and say out loud that these decisions are theirs. Our post on escalation paths and decision rights covers the mechanics. Doing this in the first week is what makes the hire worth what you are paying.

The first ninety days

A common pattern: a strong hire spends three months being told what to do, gradually stops proposing anything, and settles into executing instructions. The capability you hired for is still there and no longer being used.

Avoiding it takes two deliberate moves.

Hand over something whole, early. Not a task, an area. Returns, or supplier communication, or fulfilment. Whole ownership including the decisions, with a written limit on spend. Fragmented tasks produce an assistant; a whole area produces an operator.

Ask what is wrong, and act on one thing. In their first month they will notice things that stopped being visible to you years ago. Ask explicitly, pick one, and change it. Acting once establishes that observations are worth making; ignoring them once establishes the opposite, and the window closes fast.

What to pay attention to at three months

The signal is not whether the work is getting done. It is whether things you never had to ask about have started being handled.

A good operations hire quietly removes categories of problem from your attention. If you are still making the same decisions you were before they arrived, either the authority never actually transferred, or the fit is wrong. Both are worth diagnosing early rather than at the end of a year.

Where to look

The instinct is to advertise for ecommerce operations experience, which produces a small pool of candidates who all cost more than they need to.

Widen it. Duty managers in hospitality, pharmacy technicians, dispatch coordinators, anyone who has run a shift where things go wrong and decisions cannot wait. The transferable skill is judgement under time pressure with incomplete information, and it is much more common outside ecommerce than inside it.

What they will not have is your systems, and systems are teachable in weeks. Judgement is not teachable in weeks. Hire for the thing that takes years and train the thing that takes days.

Writing the advert

Describe the decisions rather than the tools. "You will decide whether to refund, reship or decline, usually without checking with anyone" tells a good candidate more about the job than a list of software ever will, and it filters out people who want a defined process.

Be honest about the mess. Small store operations involves doing several jobs, some of them dull, with imperfect information. Candidates who are put off by an accurate description would have been put off in month two anyway, and by then you would have paid for the recruitment twice.

The trial task

If you can, pay for two or three hours of real work before deciding. Not a hypothetical exercise, an actual backlog: a set of returns to process, or a genuine customer situation to draft a response to.

What you learn is not whether they can do the task, which most can. It is what they ask before starting, whether they notice something you had stopped noticing, and how they handle the part of the task that is genuinely ambiguous. Interviews cannot test any of that.

Common questions