Role overview
"Operations" at a small company is a generalist seat — fix the things that are broken, build the systems that are missing, own the metrics nobody else owns. The candidate's exact title in their last job matters less than what they actually got done.
There are several flavors. Be specific in your JD about which one you mean.
- Business Operations (BizOps): cross-functional analyses, planning cadence, internal tooling. Strategy-adjacent.
- Revenue Operations (RevOps): CRM, sales / CS / marketing systems, attribution, commission plans.
- People Operations: hiring ops, onboarding, performance, compensation.
- Operations / COO-track: full P&L responsibility for an area, vendor management, process design.
Job criteria
- Demonstrated bias for shipping — projects with start and end dates, not perpetual "leadership"
- Comfort with the relevant systems (Salesforce / HubSpot / Notion / Linear / Looker / Mode / Hex, depending on flavor)
- Track record of owning a metric end-to-end
- Comfort writing — most of ops is documentation, runbooks, and async memos
- Stage overlap — early-stage ops needs builders, not optimizers
What to screen for
- Did they build, or did they manage? "Project manager" pattern resumes are a poor fit for early-stage ops, which needs doers.
- Specific systems. Generic "operations" experience at a 5,000-person company often does not translate to a 30-person one.
- Metrics they owned. Ask for the number — not "drove improvements," but the actual delta.
- Range. Ops generalists who have done finance-adjacent, sales-adjacent, AND people-adjacent work tend to thrive at small companies.
- Writing. The resume itself is a writing sample. Read it as one.
Red flags
- Resume framed entirely around meetings, reviews, and stakeholder management
- "Operations leader" titles with no specific systems, processes, or metrics named
- A pattern of joining late-stage companies and inheriting mature systems, with no greenfield experience
- Generic cover letter that does not engage with your specific business model
- "Owned" claims that contradict the apparent seniority or scope at the company
Resume keywords
Salesforce, HubSpot, Notion, Linear, Asana, Looker, Mode, Hex, Tableau, vendor management, runbook, process design, tooling, automation, RFP, RFQ, SLA, OKR, KPI, north star metric, commission plan, quota planning, headcount planning, onboarding
Interview questions
- Walk me through the messiest thing you have inherited. What was state day 1, what was state day 90?
- Tell me about a tool, process, or system you built from scratch. What was the metric it was meant to move, and did it?
- What is the worst vendor relationship you have managed? How did you exit it?
- Describe a tradeoff between speed and rigor where you chose speed. Were you right?
- How do you decide which problems to fix and which to leave alone?
- We are at <stage / size> and the biggest mess is <area>. Where do you start in week one?