Director Of Operations Interview? How to Blow Away The Competition
June 22, 2010 by The Career Advisor
Filed under Job Seeker Advice
If you are hunting for a new 100k plus job as a director of operations or other senior management executive, you will be held to a much higher level of critic than most other positions that you are being hired for. You will be expected to have detailed and specific answers on the spot for a range of statistics, ideas and strategies especially, as you must have done a great job of impressing the executive recruiter or hiring manager in order to get into and interview in the first place. Your resume talked a good game, now interview time means you have to back it up.
So how are you going to blow away the competition for director of operation jobs? On paper, you can be sure that your competing candidates have seriously inflated their abilities, so you must prove you know what you are talking about and lay out exactly how you can add value to the company. This will help justify your salary request, and demonstrate when the company can expect to see your amazing talents affecting the bottom line in a big way.
Use your time ahead of the interview to do thorough research on the company, including any phone conversations or email correspondence to gain as many answers as possible. Try to find out where the issues lay with the company, where you can help and what deliverables are most important. Obviously this sounds time consuming, especially if you are applying and interviewing for several director of operations positions; however if you really want to shine it is absolutely necessary. You know the questions to ask and what to look for but are no doubt limited on valuable time, so why not outsource the actual research work as possible (just as if you were already the director of operations)? You can easily hire several freelance researchers to find out all the data you want and even format it into a polished report ahead of your interview. As just one angle, what if you ran research and comparisons between them and the competition on a number of factors to see where opportunities lay to beat out competitors? How about where the breakdowns are at the company you are interviewing with? Of course besides the data you will walk in with, solid answers and solutions, complete with a timetable and financial projections and a plan for improving segments of the company’s operation will help sell you as the new as the director of operations.
The Career Advisor
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