Top 15 Interview Questions to Ask When Hiring Managers

Hiring for any position can be difficult, but hiring for a management role is particularly challenging. In many cases, the person you’re hiring will be responsible for recruiting other staff. In a way, you’re actually modeling the interview and application process for the candidate you select.

This places an outsized importance on the interview process. You want to know the candidate you hire can address all the issues they might face thoughtfully and with expertise.

How Do You Evaluate Strong Candidates for Management Roles?

You can learn about experience and qualifications from a resume, but knowing how a candidate will perform in a management role is trickier. That’s what makes conducting an effective interview so integral to finding the best fit for your organization.

There are many things you can do to set the table for a successful interview. The job interview process can teach you a lot about a candidate’s suitability to manage a team or department within your organization—but only if you ask the right interview questions.

Key Interview Questions for Managers and How To Evaluate Candidate Responses

Here are 15 common questions a hiring manager or recruiter might ask candidates for management positions. With each interview question, we’ll explain why it’s useful and how to evaluate an interviewee’s response.

1. Describe Your Leadership Style for Me

Learning about a manager’s style is very important. This allows the candidate to display how deeply they think about their role and how they see themselves as professionals. Look for ways their methodology corresponds with the values and culture of your organization. See if they can provide a concrete example of how their management style informs their work.

2. Is There a Former Manager or Supervisor You’ve Had That Has Inspired Your Management Style?

When hiring a manager, you can use this question instead of, or in addition to, the previous one. This allows the candidate to talk about their style or hiring philosophy and explain where they got their ideas from.

3. Do You Have any Management-Related Certifications?

These certifications might apply to project management, verify a skill for a product manager or concern software that’s key for a managerial role. This interview question may not apply if one or more certifications are prerequisites listed in the job description and you or a colleague has already confirmed the candidate has earned those certifications.

If you don’t have that information, this question can reveal how dedicated the applicant is to their professional development. You can also ask how such certifications have helped them in their career and what they learned from their courses.

4. How Do You Measure Success?

A good leader needs to know what success looks like for their teams. They also need to know if they’re on pace to deliver. You want to know that any manager you hire has clear ideas about what achievement looks like for a team in their department. Also, consider asking what metrics they use to measure success. This can prompt a more detailed response and may be especially helpful depending on the industry in which you operate.

5. What’s Your Approach to Goal Setting?

When done right, goal setting gets the best out of team members. How does a managerial candidate set goals that make staff strive toward optimal performance? How do they avoid setting goals that are unrealistic and demoralizing for their teams?

6. How Do You Motivate Your Team Members?

This common interview question ties into the previous one, as motivating staff to achieve goals is often a major part of a manager’s job. This may be an instance where the candidate uses the STAR method (situation, task, action, result). STAR is a way for interviewees to showcase their experience. This method allows them to root their answers in real-world scenarios, painting the interviewer a picture of how they work.

7. Tell Me About a Time You Had To Manage an Employee Who Wasn’t Meeting Expectations.

Situational questions can elicit a real-world example from a candidate. Working with team members and handling uncertainty to overcome obstacles and meet expectations is a key part of any manager’s job. It’s also a tricky issue to solve and organizations have different approaches they prefer for their work culture.

8. What Solutions Do You Use to Help You in Your Role?

This manager interview question depends on the type of work you and your organization do. It may not apply to all situations, but knowing what solutions, software, platforms or tools candidates use or have used in the past can be helpful information. Management software is a big industry—worth roughly $60 billion—so it’s vital to successful leadership in many industries.

9. What Kind of Culture Do You Try To Cultivate for Your Teams?

Company culture is key for any business. Knowing the type of culture a candidate prefers, is used to or is comfortable with can tell you if they’ll fit in well with your organization. It also gives you a sense of the candidate’s personality and temperament.

Remember, though, that people can change their style to suit the organization they’re in or the team they manage. If an applicant has a certain approach with a different company, that doesn’t mean they can’t adapt to the culture of your organization. Perhaps what’s most important for this answer is that the candidate has a thoughtful response and knows the importance of work culture.

10. How Do You Handle Delegating and Assigning Responsibilities?

How much work and how many tasks managers delegate to their staff — and when they delegate — can tell you a lot about how they operate. Consider asking how they handle switching work between team members and reassigning tasks to adjust on the fly.

11. How Would You Resolve a Conflict Between Members of Your Team?

It’s important to address how a managerial candidate has handled, or might handle, a negative situation. Occasionally coworkers clash — sometimes badly so. It’s up to a manager to resolve such a conflict. This can be the hardest part of a manager’s job, so it’s a good behavioral interview question to ask. Pay attention again if they use the STAR method or otherwise give an example from their past.

12. Tell Me About a Time You Had To Overcome a Significant Obstacle on a Project.

Management interview questions such as these probe how a candidate might make lemonade out of lemons. When behind on a project or facing some notable obstacle, do they have the leadership skills to find a solution? Do they get creative? Does adversity motivate them? Or do they crumble?

13. What Are the Responsibilities of Your Current Position?

If they don’t have a current management position, you can easily alter this question to ask about a previous position. Their answer tells you if they’ve handled all the tasks that the available position will ask of them. It’s not always necessary that they have experience with every one of the responsibilities you’re looking for them to fulfill, but a good experience base is probably required.

14. How Do You Find the Line Between Giving Your Team Members Too Much Freedom and Micromanaging Them?

These two extremes represent common pitfalls in management. Some managers are too laissez-faire and their team members lack the structure they need to succeed. Others are too involved in their staff’s work and interfere with them, upsetting their workflow and momentum. Finding the right middle ground is integral to any manager’s success.

15. How Long Do You Feel It Takes a New Hire To Get Fully Up to Speed?

If the manager you’re hiring will be in charge of recruiting their own team members, or otherwise training and onboarding them, this is a valuable question to ask. It’s usually unwise to rush new hires to be as effective as veteran team members, but it’s good to have a plan for training and integrating new staff relatively quickly.

Their answer may also reveal how long they expect it will take for them to get up to speed themselves if you hire them for a managerial role. You can also ask them directly how they’ll approach their own onboarding if you tender them the job offer.

ApplicantStack Can Help You Find the Best Candidate for Your Management Role

ApplicantStack helps businesses evaluate candidates and hire the best ones for management roles at their organizations. The platform offers solutions for recruiting and hiring, candidate management and onboarding. With an end-to-end recruiting solution that streamlines, automates and optimizes the traditional, time-consuming tasks of hiring new candidates, you can save time and money while making informed decisions.

We can help your organization flourish by hiring the best manager in your candidate pool. Start a free trial and find out how we can help you and your business today.