Hiring someone with experience is easier often as they have something relevant to talk about. I am hiring a junior / near fresher. So, no revenue operations experience is expected. What things do I look out for? What questions do I ask? Any assignment that you can suggest?
When hiring someone without RevOps experience, I focus on transferable skills that predict success:
Analytical, Data-Driven Thinking – Can they break down complex problems logically? A good test is a case study with simple and well documented data that requires idea generation, prioritization, numerical reasoning, and recommendations. Dry-run it with high performers, mentors, and non-RevOps folks.
Curiosity – Do they have a strong drive to learn and a structured approach to self-teaching? Ask: “Tell me about a time you learned something difficult on your own.” or “What’s the last skill you taught yourself?” Look for perseverance, resourcefulness, and efficiency.
Communication & Stakeholder Management – Can they convey ideas clearly and influence decision-makers? An interview with a senior non-RevOps leader helps assess clarity and conciseness. You can also use conflict resolution questions (even from academic settings) or ask for comms approach in "tricky" scenarios (e.g., giving tough feedback, owning a model mistake, troubleshooting a tech issue).
Adaptability – Are they comfortable with ambiguity and shifting priorities? Add plot twists to the case study or ask counterfactuals like, “Would your answer change if growth was the only goal, not margin?” Having candidates walk through a major professional/academic change and how they handled it can be highly valuable as well. Dig deeper into their thought process through uncertainty.
Quick note on assignments: in my experience those work best to set the scene, not as "take-home exams". Treat them as step 1 of a business case. For example, provide a dataset and ask for 3 insights + 3 follow-up questions as output. This helps assess data hygiene and hypothesis formulation, but the real value is in the live discussion: dive into problem-solving choices and logic pathways. Use extra data live in the interview to pressure-test assumptions, explore second-order effects, and test their comfort in pivoting on new data.
When hiring for individual contributor roles, I personally encourage my teams to hire a healthy mix between seasoned and unexperienced individuals. Although a seasoned individual will ramp much faster and work more independently, a recent college grad often brings fresh energy and curiosity to the team.
When interviewing individuals with limited work experience, I focus mainly on:
Raw horsepower: strong quantitative and problem-solving skills. Applying a case study is a must - does not need to be a business strategy case, it can be a pure quantitative case study. One case I like is "How many people ever lived on earth?" (fun fact: this case was part of the interview process for my first job out of college)
Attitude: In RevOps, there are times when workload is very high (e.g. planning season) and we need to be able to rely on our team members. I firmly believe the age of 20s and early 30s is the period when folks will learn the most skills professionally but do so, they need to be willing to work hard. Attitude is something not trivial to evaluate during an interview - but an interviewer can get signals by asking questions such as "Tell me one situation when you were working against an aggressive deadline and that required you to go the extra mile. How did you handle that? What did you learn about your limits?". Also, describing the job expectations and its ups and downs allows you to evaluate how the candidate responds or perhaps even opt-out
When interviewing someone for a more junior role, I structure my questions using the journalistic "Inverted Pyramid" technique:
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Initial Questions: Focus on general knowledge and basic skills required for the position (based on the job description).
These are the non-negotiables of the position, translated into non-work-specific questions.
In a 30 minute interview, I would spend about 10-12 minutes on these types of questions.
For example: If I'm hiring someone in Sales Ops, I'd provide math word problems to see how they would calculate/proof commissions calculations. For Dev Ops, ask about familiarity with coding languages and what projects they've done. This section is also where I focus on communication and team skills.
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Follow Up Questions: Focus on higher level skills related to the position.
These are skills that will be part of onboarding for the role; the goal of the question is to see if the person has experience/familiarity with the concepts already.
In a 30 minute interview, I'd spend about 8-10 minutes on these types of questions.
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For example:
In hiring an Admin for the team, I found that people said they had Excel experience, but they didn't. So, I created an in-interview assessment. The "follow up" question I asked was for the candidates to de-dupe a list of records. Weaker candidates would sort the list and manually review for duplicates. More experienced ones would use the "Remove Duplicates" function after clarifying the key data points for identifying duplicate records. Either method showed me that they understood the skill; one just required more onboarding than the other.
For analyst roles, ask a question like, "How many Snickers bars would fit in a suitcase?" or similar. The idea is to see how the candidate deals with the missing information. Is the candidate asking questions to clarify and provide a more educated response, or is the candidate giving a response based on assumptions?
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Final Questions: Focus on real-world experience with the role.
These questions are "stretch" questions to see if the person has experience with key aspects of the role. For these questions, most of the time you'll just observe how the candidate handles the inquiry and their response, rather than listen for an actual "right" answer.
In a 30 minute interview, I'd spend 2-5 minutes on these types of questions. If the candidate flounders on the answer, I let them know that I was just looking to see the range of their experience and it's not a problem if they don't have an answer.
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For example:
In my Admin example, my Final Question was one that involved creating an Excel formula to do a specific calculation (one that was needed for the reporting the Admin would manage).
For other roles, ask questions related to scenarios your team/this role will experience. The candidate may have had experience in a different context (school project, team sports etc).