PEOPLE AND OPERATIONS
How to assess a potential manager before you hire
A good interview can leave you with plenty of confidence and very little evidence. If you want to understand how a prospective manager works, give them a small piece of the job to think through.
Keep it short, relevant and consistent. You are looking at how they handle a problem, not asking them to produce a free strategy for your business.
Here is a practical starting point for a sales management role. Adapt it to the decisions the person must be able to make when they join. It is a discussion exercise, not a validated psychometric test or a guaranteed predictor of performance.
Decide what you need to observe
Before meeting candidates, choose the behaviours that matter. For this exercise, I would look for four: asking useful questions, choosing a sensible priority, explaining a decision and responding to new evidence.
Do not quietly add “sounds like me” or “has worked somewhere impressive” to the list. A polished presentation is not the task. Neither is knowing your preferred sales method.
Tell candidates what the exercise involves, how long it should take and what you will assess. Offer an accessible format and discuss any adjustments in advance. You can change the format or allow appropriate additional time while keeping the job-related criteria consistent.
Give everyone the same fictional brief
“You are joining a four-person sales team. Last month the team received 100 enquiries and booked 12 first meetings. The owner wants more meetings but does not want to spend more on advertising yet. You have one week to investigate and propose a first change.”
Make clear that these numbers describe a fictional business. They are not industry benchmarks. There is deliberately not enough information to diagnose the problem from the brief alone.
Give candidates the same facts and core questions. Prepare a short answer sheet so interviewers do not give one person helpful extra information and leave another guessing. If something is unknown, say so and ask how they would find out. Do not invent a different business halfway through each interview.
Run a 20 minute conversation
Allow three minutes to read and make notes. Use the next five minutes for questions, then five for an initial recommendation. Spend five minutes on the new information below and two on a summary. No slide deck or homework is needed.
Ask the same core questions:
- What would you need to know before deciding what is wrong?
- What would you check first, and why?
- What would you ask the team to do this week?
- How would you know whether it helped?
Listen for the connection between the answer and the problem. “Improve the CRM” is too broad on its own. Checking whether enquiries have an owner and a recorded next action is something a team could actually do.
Introduce new information
At the same point in every discussion, add this:
“You now learn that 40 enquiries were from outside the area the business serves. Among the remaining 60, 25 received no first response for at least two working days. Response-time records for the other 35 are incomplete. You do not yet know which enquiries became meetings.”
Then ask: “What does that change in your recommendation? What would you still need to check?”
A candidate might separate suitability from follow-up, check the missing records and assign someone to deal with unanswered enquiries. They might choose another reasonable route. What matters is whether they explain it and recognize the limits of the information.
Changing their mind is useful when the evidence warrants it. Agreeing with every suggestion you make tells you much less. Ask them to explain what they have kept, what they have changed and why.
Score the behaviour you actually saw
Use a simple three-point scale for each area. Write down the evidence alongside the score.
Questions: 1: jumps to a solution without checking assumptions. 2: asks relevant questions about the enquiries and process. 3: explains which missing information would change the decision.
Priorities: 1: proposes a broad overhaul without a clear starting point. 2: chooses a manageable first action. 3: connects that action to the evidence and explains what can wait.
Clarity: 1: leaves the team without a usable next step. 2: explains what to do and who should do it. 3: also sets a sensible check for whether it worked.
Revision: 1: ignores the new facts. 2: adjusts the recommendation to reflect them. 3: explains the change and identifies what remains uncertain.
If the exercise did not give you evidence for an area, mark it “not observed” rather than guessing. Where two people assess the candidate, have each record their judgement before discussing it. Revisit differences using what the candidate actually said or did.
Use the result to sharpen the hiring decision
Do not turn the total into an automatic pass mark. This small exercise cannot establish everything a manager needs, and it does not measure their future learning capacity.
Use it alongside relevant experience, structured interview answers and references. Follow up on gaps. Keep skills you genuinely need on day one separate from those you are prepared to teach.
For the wider decision about experience, potential and the support a new manager needs, read Your next manager needs more than experience.
Before the next interview, agree the brief, questions and scoring anchors. You will have a clearer conversation about the person you might hire, and fewer vague arguments about who “felt right”.