What are Good Interview Questions to Ask When Hiring a General Manager?

If you are looking for how to hire a general manager for family entertainment center business, you must prepare a set of interview questions for your prospective candidates to assess if they are the right person for the job. This will also enable you to check if an applicant is a good fit for your company culture, your team, and your business.

To help you ask the right questions that generate the answers and outcomes that you hope for, we talked to Embed's very own Kash Ahmad, Chief Management Consultant in Operations at NASA. Ahmad has over 25 years of extensive experience in the amusement and hospitality industry, including recruiting general managers for top family entertainment centers in the business.

Choosing the right general manager for your FEC is crucial to ensure that your company culture has a steady footing: "A good leader can make all the difference. Different employees work differently depending on the manager. Taking the time to make the right selection for the manager you’re going to bring on board is essential. If you bring in the wrong person who doesn’t believe in your culture or plan, does not care about your employees, or doesn’t care about the business that much, it can really move your culture backward," emphasizes Ahmad.

1. Craft Generic Questions.

A family entertainment center general manager should have a high-level, on-the-ground experience when it comes to both operational and situational management of the business. To scope out how intensive this experience is, you can consider asking about the following:

• Management style
• Ideal company culture
• Fostering a manager-employee relationship
• Steps for employee retention
• How to empower employees

These will help you disarm the candidate to talk freely about how they used to run a location, manage people, give and receive feedback, design processes to improve operations, and other important factors that shape your ideal FEC environment.

At the same time, you can get a glimpse of what the candidate is expecting out of your organization in terms of culture: "Company culture defines the set of attitudes and practices of your organization and characterizes it. The right culture improves employee retention, attracts the right employees, and helps you establish your brand and the way your brand interacts with customers," says Ahmad. 

2. Use the STAR Technique.

The second set of interview questions is where you can assess how your candidate responds to certain situations. This can be done by providing scenarios specific to family entertainment center operations or customers and asking the candidate to answer using the STAR technique - Situation, Task, Action, and Result.

Here are some examples you can follow:

• You leave your facility to take your break and see an employee in the parking lot drinking alcohol while on their break. How do you handle this situation?
• You are short staffed, and all working employees are busy. A last-minute birthday party shows up with 15 kids. You have a room available but no employees to host them in the party room. What do you do?
• A guest claims that a redemption game did not pay out the correct number of tickets. This happened 10 minutes ago, and it was not immediately brought to your attention. How will you handle the situation?

You can come up with a series of questions skewed toward employee management and some toward the guest experience. To complement this, you can also prepare a ready list of your expectations per question. For instance, in the first question, you are expecting the applicant to make a reference to a company policy along with a disciplinary response. A list of expectations will expedite deliberation.

3. Make Different Question Categories.

Because there is no one way to frame interview questions, you can try listing down questions into categories such as operations and behavior. Doing this can help you cover a lot of ground during the interview process and identify if the candidate is going to move forward. 

Here are some examples of categorized questions for your future general manager:

• OPERATIONAL QUESTIONS
  • How do you motivate your employees?
  • How do you train staff members and develop their potential?
  • How do you delegate tasks and ensure excellent task completion?
  • What are your strategies to establish good communication with your team?
  • When creating operational strategies and processes, what key metrics do you use?
  • Can you give examples of store-specific strategies and policies that you have crafted and implemented?
  • What is excellent customer service for you?
  • How did you address operational losses in the past?

• BEHAVIORAL QUESTIONS
  • How do you handle or manage an angry customer?
  • Have you resolved any internal employee conflict in the past? How?
  • What is your personal policy on underperforming staff?
  • Can you describe a mistake you have committed in your previous job and what accountability measures did you take?

You are well on your way to finding the right person for the job when you have the right interview questions. More than eloquent and well-thought answers, Ahmad reminds recruiters to look for passion and potential when hiring a GM:

"In today’s landscape, it’s tough to find someone who checks all your boxes right away. Can you find people who can develop a passion for the industry? Can they grow into it? It’s just a matter of making sure that they check the important boxes like being active and interactive with employees, a background in training, recognizing employees and their goals with them – all these are broad and are applicable to other industries too."

If you haven't yet, download this FREE Sample Interview Questions for an FEC General Manager. You can also check out our full guide on How to Hire a General Manager. Happy hunting!