General Manager Interview Questions and a Scoring Guide

A general manager runs a business, or a large part of one, on your behalf: the revenue and the costs, the day-to-day operations and the managers who lead each team. When the hire works, the unit performs without you in the room. When it doesn't, the cost shows up in the numbers and in the people who leave.

Much of that judgment is made in the interview. In an unstructured interview, each interviewer asks different questions, likes different answers and remembers different moments, so the panel ends up comparing impressions. This guide gives you a structured alternative. It starts with a scorecard to fill in before you meet anyone, then 30 questions grouped by what the job needs, each with what a strong answer shows and the warning signs. It ends with a scoring scale and a way to run the interview and the debrief so the scores mean something.

DisclosureJake Jorgovan co-founded Alpha Apex Group, which is mentioned in this article.

Write the scorecard before the questions

The title general manager covers a wide range of responsibilities. O*NET (opens in a new tab), the US Department of Labor's occupation database, describes general and operations managers as people who plan, direct or coordinate operations across multiple departments or locations, usually through other managers. Their duties are too broad to fit any one function. A hotel GM, a plant GM and the GM of a software business unit can share that description and still need very different experience. The questions that matter depend on what your GM will own.

A mistake I've made, and seen many others make, is finding someone you like and then working out how they fit. As I put it on my podcast in 2020: "If you have a great person that doesn't fit within your organization, you're just setting yourself up for a disaster." The fix is to write the role down first, then go one step further and define what success looks like at 90 days, ideally before you make the hire. For a general manager, I'd add the 12-month outcomes and the numbers they will own, because those are what the interview has to test.

Choose questions only from the areas your scorecard names. You will not need all 30 in one interview. Splitting the groups across interviewers lets each area be covered once, in depth, instead of every interviewer skimming the same ground.

Why the structure matters

A structured interview asks every candidate the same questions in the same order, scores the answers on a common rating scale, and has the interviewers agree in advance on what an acceptable answer looks like. That is how the US Office of Personnel Management defines it in its practical guide (opens in a new tab). The guide adds that an unstructured interview is very subjective, which reduces its accuracy and invites legal challenges.

OPM's summary of the research (opens in a new tab) says interviews with more structure show higher validity, better agreement between raters and less adverse impact. Questions about past behavior have shown higher validity than hypothetical ones where the work is highly complex, such as professional and managerial jobs. That suits a general manager search.

A 2022 re-analysis of personnel selection research (opens in a new tab), published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, concluded that earlier studies had substantially overestimated how well many hiring methods predict job performance. Structured interviews still came out as the top-ranked selection procedure.

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Selected mean validity estimates from the 2022 reanalysis, reproduced in Sackett and colleagues’ 2023 follow-up: structured interviews 0.42, work samples 0.33, and unstructured interviews 0.19. These are corrected correlations with job performance, not percentages of candidates a method predicts correctly. Validity varies across settings.doi.org (opens in a new tab)

Google publishes its own guide (opens in a new tab) to the approach it uses. It reports that pre-made questions, guides and rubrics save its interviewers an average of 40 minutes per interview, and that rejected candidates who had a structured interview were 35% happier than those who did not. Those are Google's results for its own process. They suggest structure need not make an interview slower or harder on candidates.

The questions, grouped by what the job needs

About half the questions below ask about past behavior ("Tell me about a time..."). A few are hypothetical ("What would you do if..."), which shows how a candidate reasons through a situation they may not have met. Google's guide uses both kinds, each with follow-up questions decided in advance. The rest ask how the candidate works or what they want from this role; when an answer stays general, ask for a recent example. The strong-answer signs and warning signs are a starting point: rewrite them for your business before the first interview, so every interviewer listens for the same things.

Running the business and its numbers

Operations and priorities

Leading through other managers

Problems, conflict and pressure

Strategy, growth and change

This role, in this business

The warning sign about wanting different work is one I learned from hiring for my own companies. On the same 2020 episode I described having hired someone who wanted to move into different work over time, and why I'd avoid that mismatch. You want someone who is excited about the work the role involves.

Choose follow-up probes for each question

OPM's guide recommends deciding in advance how much probing is allowed and which probes belong to each question. It also asks for very similar probes for every candidate, so each has the same chance to do well. The wording can respond to the answer while keeping the same meaning. For questions about past behavior, these follow its situation, action and outcome pattern:

For the hypothetical questions, choose follow-ups such as these:

For questions about motivation and support, agree follow-ups that tie the answer back to the role's responsibilities and reporting line.

How to score the answers

Score each answer on the same numerical range, against criteria written for that question. OPM recommends at least three proficiency levels, ideally five to seven, with at least three of them labeled. Google often documents what poor, borderline, solid and outstanding answers would cover for the attributes each question tests. For past-behavior questions, judge the candidate's own actions and outcomes. For hypothetical ones, judge the proposed actions, the trade-offs and how they would check success. For questions about motivation and support, judge the fit with your scorecard and dealbreakers. The five-level scale below is a starting point to adapt:

Before the first interview, write a short example answer for each level of each question you will use, or at least for levels 1, 3 and 5, the way OPM's guide and Google's rubrics do. That is what turns a number into a shared standard: when two interviewers give a 4, they mean the same thing.

Run every interview the same way

1. 1

   Agree the questions and the scoring first

   Finish the scorecard, choose the questions, write the example answers for each score and decide who covers which area. Pilot the questions on someone who knows the role well if you can.

2. 2

   Ask the same questions in the same order

   Every candidate, internal or external, gets the same lead questions and comparable follow-up probes agreed for each question. Leave candidates' resumes and other papers aside during the interview: OPM's guide warns that interviewers may rate answers from candidates with strong resumes more favorably.

3. 3

   Take notes on what the candidate says

   Write down what the candidate said and did, not your impression of them. Detailed notes are the record that supports each rating and, later, the hiring decision.

4. 4

   Score alone, straight after the interview

   Each interviewer reviews their notes and scores the candidate immediately after the interview, before talking to anyone else. That way every rating starts as the interviewer's own judgment, the order the OPM guide sets out for panels.

5. 5

   Compare, then resolve the differences

   The panel then compares scores and notes, discusses the reasons for any large differences and agrees a rating for each area. A large disagreement can be a sign that the example answers need to be clearer.

6. 6

   Watch for rating errors and interviewing mistakes

   The guide lists several, including deciding in the first few minutes, letting a strong answer in one area raise the scores in others (the halo effect), and rating a candidate against the one interviewed just before instead of against the scale.

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The approach described in this article, shown as a visual guide.

Questions to leave out

The US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (opens in a new tab) says the information requested before hiring should generally be limited to what is essential for deciding whether a person is qualified for the job. Employers are explicitly prohibited from asking about disability before an offer, and the EEOC advises generally avoiding questions whose answers could indicate race, sex, national origin, disability status, age, religion, color or ancestry.

So keep small talk away from health, age, national origin and family circumstances, however friendly the intent. Questions about relevant work experience belong in the interview. The EEOC's page on marital status and children (opens in a new tab) says employers generally should not ask non-job-related questions about marital status or the number and ages of children. Even when they are asked of men and women alike, such questions may be seen as evidence of intent to discriminate. This is US federal guidance; state laws and other countries' rules differ, so have employment counsel review your interview guide. A written guide helps here too: when every question is tied to the scorecard, there is less room for an off-script one.

Before the first interview

If you can't fill in the 90-day line of the scorecard, resolve that before meeting candidates. Once the scorecard, the questions, the follow-ups and the scoring criteria are agreed, you are ready to start interviewing.