The market for operations managers is tight in most U.S. regions. That shortage is real. Employers compete for people who have run shifts, managed budgets, and hit KPIs in industries with real physical or delivery constraints. A strong plant manager candidate knows more than theory; they have lived through schedule changes, equipment failures, and labor shortages.
Hiring for operations goes wrong when the job description lists every task but says nothing about scope. You need to know whether the person managed a $2M budget or a $40M budget, supervised 12 people or 120, and owned a single line or a whole site. Another common mistake is hiring for technical knowledge alone while ignoring whether the person can hold a morning production meeting, review a variance report, coach a supervisor, and make a call on a line stoppage all before lunch.
Titles we recruit
- Operations Manager
- Plant Manager
- Site Manager
- Production Manager
- Project Manager
- Program Manager
- Director of Operations
- Vice President of Operations
How candidates are assessed
We screen operations candidates against four things: budget size, headcount, KPI history, and the systems they used. A candidate must show us the numbers they owned, the shifts they covered, and the vendors or unions they dealt with. We verify P&L responsibility, safety metrics, on-time delivery, scrap or defect rates, and labor costs. We also check whether they have led Lean or Six Sigma projects and what software they used for scheduling, inventory, or ERP. The goal is to confirm they have run something at a scale close to yours.
Where we recruit for these roles
Northeast, Midwest, South, West, and every state in between. Popular cities include New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston, San Antonio, Austin.