An Area Manager oversees the management and operations of multiple stores in a certain geographic area. As regional managers, they lay out the strategic direction for a group of your company’s stores. Their end goal is to create and implement a business development plan that increases revenue generated by all the stores in the area.
When interviewing an Area Manager candidate, you should see if they possess any of the following skills or characteristics:
- Excellent management and leadership skills, preferably leading a large team, multiple smaller teams, or one or more stores
- Strong communication, education, and presentation skills as they not only have to lead teams but actively train and educate them as well
- Strategic and analytical thinking as they have to define regional strategies for your stores based on (sales) data and store performance
Interviewing an Area Manager
So you may have found the perfect candidate to become your new Area Manager? That’s great news! But you’re not there yet.
People often focus on how important it is for interviewees to make a good first impression and answer interview questions correctly. But what’s often overlooked is that it’s just as important for the interviewer to come prepared and ask the right questions.
After all, if you ask bad questions, you won’t actually find the answers you’re after. Before you know it, you’re hiring a candidate based on gut feeling and “how nice they were during the interview” rather than on how well they fit into your business and the role.
The Area Manager interview questions below help you avoid that problem. These questions are specifically designed to be asked early on during the interview process. They help you filter out the right candidates to move on to the next stage of the process.
How to open the job interview
You might be tempted to dive straight in with some tough, job-specific questions. But that’s often not a good idea.
Instead, we advise you to start the interview off slowly with some easy opening questions. This will help put your candidate at ease and calm their nerves. As a result, you will get much better answers out of them during the interview that better reflect their actual knowledge and skills.