Behavioral Interview Questions for IT Operations Managers
By Dara Halloran · Under Pressure
What behavioral questions do IT operations manager interviews ask? Expect a major incident you led, a change that caused an outage, a vendor failure, an on-call team close to burnout, a backlog you had to prioritise and a process you automated. Show how you communicated during the incident, not just how you fixed it, and bring numbers: uptime, time to restore, ticket volumes.
IT operations managers are judged on the hours nobody notices and the minutes everybody does. Interview panels know this, so the questions concentrate on what happens when things break: who you called, what you told the business, and what you changed so it would not happen again.
Major incidents
"Tell me about the worst outage you've managed." This is the centre of most IT operations interviews. A strong answer covers four things, in order: how you found out and how fast, how you organised the response (who was incident lead, who was fixing, who was communicating), what you told the business and how often, and the review afterwards.
Communication is where many candidates are weakest, and it is often what the panel cares about most. One practical point: when the business asks "when will it be back?", give an estimate as a range in numbers, with your confidence, rather than a vague phrase. In five experiments with nearly 5,800 people, van der Bles and colleagues found that communicating uncertainty lowered trust only slightly, and mainly when it was expressed in words rather than numbers.1 "Between 30 and 90 minutes; we'll update you at 2:30" is a better answer than "hopefully soon", and an answer that shows you know that is a strong one.
"Tell me about a time an incident was caused by your own team." Ownership matters here. Say what went wrong, plainly, and spend most of the answer on what changed.
Changes
"Tell me about a change that caused an outage." Show what the change process missed, and what you did about the process, not just the change.
"How do you balance the speed of change against stability?" Use an example: a time you had to decide whether to approve a risky change before a deadline, and how you reduced the risk (a rollback plan, a smaller first step, a quieter time).
Vendors and dependencies
"Tell me about a time a vendor or cloud provider failed you." The panel is looking for preparation (what you had in place before the failure) and communication (how you kept the business informed about something you could not fix yourself).
The team
"Tell me about a time your on-call team was close to burnout." Describe the signal (pages per week, overnight call-outs, sick leave, someone telling you), the change (fixing the noisiest alerts, adding people to the rota, changing escalation) and the result.
"Tell me about someone on your team you developed." IT operations panels want managers who grow engineers, not just keep the lights on.
Priorities
"Tell me about a time the ticket backlog was out of control." Show how you triaged, what you said no to, and how you made the trade-off visible to the people waiting.
"Tell me about something you automated." What was manual, how often, what it cost, what you automated and what changed in hours or errors.
One answer, told well
"At 9:10 on a Monday our authentication service went down for every internal system. I took incident lead, put one engineer on the fix and one on communication, and we posted the first update at 9:20: 'Logins are failing across internal tools. We expect them back between 10:00 and 11:00. Next update 9:50.' The cause was an expired certificate that our monitoring didn't cover. We restored service at 10:25. Afterwards we added certificate expiry to monitoring for every service, with alerts thirty days out, and we haven't had a certificate outage since."
It has the timeline, a clear split of roles, a real update with a range in it, the cause and the change that stuck.
The numbers to have ready
Availability of the main services you ran, mean time to restore, number of major incidents per quarter, change failure rate if you tracked it, ticket volumes and backlog, and the size of your team and on-call rota.
Telling the story
Use a real incident for each answer, told in order with the timeline: the STAR technique gives you the structure. For the communication side of an incident, the advice in presentation tips for software development managers on presenting uncertain dates applies just as well to restore times. And if you lead engineers as well as operations staff, behavioral interview questions for engineering managers covers the people side in more depth.
References
- van der Bles, A. M., van der Linden, S., Freeman, A. L. J., & Spiegelhalter, D. J. (2020). The effects of communicating uncertainty on public trust in facts and numbers. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 117(14), 7672–7683. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1913678117