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.