5 mistakes hiring managers make when interviewing VP Operations candidates in US food manufacturing

Three of the last four VP Operations searches I ran were second-attempt searches, meaning the client had already hired someone, parted ways inside year one, and was starting over. In every case, the same pattern showed up when I looked back at the first hire's interview process.

The wrong VP Operations doesn't reveal itself in the resume. It reveals itself in the interview, when the questions you ask don't expose what you actually need to know.

Here are the five mistakes I see most often, what to ask instead, and what the right answers should sound like.

1. Treating "manufacturing experience" as interchangeable with "food manufacturing experience"

This is the most expensive mistake. A VP Operations who has spent twenty years in automotive, industrial, or even non-food CPG warehousing is not ready to run a food plant on day one, even though the resume says "operations leader, multi-site, $200M P&L."

Food manufacturing is its own discipline. Perishability changes everything: shift scheduling around shelf life, sanitation cycles eating into production windows, allergen segregation, customer compliance windows around retailer resets. These aren't transferable from other manufacturing verticals; they're the job.

Ask instead: "Walk me through how you'd schedule a 24-hour shutdown for a CIP cycle on a line running three SKUs with different allergen profiles." If they don't know what CIP is, the interview can end there.

2. Not screening for regulatory fluency in your specific environment

FDA, USDA, SQF, BRCGS, FSSC 22000, FSMA, these aren't acronyms a VP Operations can pick up on the job. They define how the plant runs. A leader who hasn't lived inside an unannounced audit doesn't make the same decisions as one who has.

The mistake here is treating audit-readiness as a Quality function, "that's the VP of Quality's job." It isn't. The VP of Operations runs the plant 364 days a year. The VP of Quality is the auditor, not the operator. A VP Ops who hasn't been answerable to the inspector at 6am on a Tuesday makes operational decisions that put the audit at risk.

Ask instead: "Tell me about a time the FDA or USDA showed up unannounced. What was the first hour like, and what changed in your operation afterwards?" The candidate who can't answer in concrete terms either hasn't had the experience or didn't own it.

3. Falling for the OEE / EBITDA improvement number without checking how

Every VP Operations resume in this market reads the same: "Lifted OEE by 14 points." "Improved EBITDA by $8M." "Drove labour productivity up 22%."

These numbers might be real. They also might be the work of a capex programme, a line replacement, or a market tailwind that any competent leader would have inherited. The question isn't whether the number is true. The question is what the leader contributed to it.

Ask instead: "Of those 14 OEE points, how many came from capex, how many from operating model changes, and how many from people changes, and what did your role look like in each?" A candidate who's lived through real continuous improvement will break the number down naturally. A candidate who pulled the number off a slide deck will struggle to.

4. Skipping the floor walk

I would not let a final-stage VP Operations candidate sign an offer without first walking the plant they'd be running. Not a tour, a working walk, two to three hours, with the candidate asking the questions.

Hiring managers skip this step for the wrong reasons. Sometimes it's confidentiality (the workforce doesn't know the role is open). Sometimes it's scheduling. Usually it's that the interview process is already too long. So the candidate accepts an offer, starts on day one, and then sees what they signed up for.

The floor walk tells you two things you cannot get from a meeting room. First, can they see, do they spot the bottlenecks, the safety issues, the labour-allocation problems, before you mention them? Second, do the operators and supervisors warm to them in the first five minutes, or close up?

Make it standard: every VP Operations finalist walks the primary site for at least two hours before offer. If confidentiality matters, do it after-hours or under an NDA. Don't skip it.

5. Hiring for the job spec you wrote, not the operation you have

Every job spec is a snapshot from the moment you wrote it. By the time you're interviewing, six, eight, twelve weeks later, the operation has moved on. The plant you described in the spec isn't quite the plant you have anymore. A new customer has signed. A line has gone down. A regulator has flagged something. The previous VP has decompressed three more decisions you'll inherit on day one.

The mistake is interviewing against the spec instead of against the current state. The result is a candidate hired for last quarter's problem.

Ask instead: before the final interview, share a one-page brief on the current operational state, the three problems you'd want them to attack in their first 90 days today, not the three you wrote into the spec eight weeks ago. Then ask: "How would you sequence those three?" The candidate's answer is the test.

What this looks like done right

A good VP Operations interview process in US food manufacturing has five things baked into it:

1. A food-manufacturing-specific scenario that screens for industry knowledge, not generic operations knowledge.

2. A live or recent regulatory experience question that exposes whether the candidate has owned an audit response, not just attended one.

3. A decomposition of their headline numbers so you understand what they contributed versus what they inherited.

4. A working floor walk at finalist stage, with the candidate leading the questions.

5. A current-state brief the candidate responds to live, not a six-week-old spec.

If your process doesn't have all five, your search is exposed to the same pattern that gives me my second-attempt work.

I run VP Operations searches across US food manufacturing every quarter, for refrigerated foods, frozen, bakery, snacks, dairy, and protein processors. If you'd like an outside view of your VP Ops shortlist or interview plan before you sign someone, the easiest way to start a conversation is at williams-recruitment.com/contact, or write to me directly at scott@williams-recruitment.com.

The recent VP Operations placements I can talk about are at williams-recruitment.com/services/vp-of-operations-recruitment.