Community Manager Interview Preparation Guide

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Making decision to give gate pass for free or charge for it.

Tenant does not feel she needs a lease to live in parents home. Our covenants state a lease must be on file. Explained that to her and she understood.

Dealing with people with a certain entitlement or just being rude.

Many community manager roles involve elements of customer service. After all, you’re interacting with people daily and will often encounter someone who is reaching out to you with an issue that needs solving. Let your interviewer see that they can trust you to be the face of and voice for the community.

Engaging, keeping, and attracting new users are goals for most (but not all) communities. Be prepared with two or three ideas to achieve these goals. Don’t worry about presenting original ideas here—you’re interviewing for a job, not providing free consulting advice. Just show the hiring manager that you have ideas. If you suggest ideas they’ve already tried, well, that shows you’re on the same page.

Your interviewer is asking this question to see if you can demonstrate your understanding of what a community is and what it means to belong to one. We’re all part of many communities throughout our lives. If you’re an active commenter on BuzzFeed and know the other commenters there, then you’re part of the BuzzFeed community. If not online, maybe you were a member of an after-school club or local charity. Be capable of talking about a time you contributed to a community in some shape or form.

“Community” as a term is something tossed around in conversation frequently, but few folks have thought to consider what it actually means. Good community talent will have their own opinions and theories and will be able to provide a succinct definition off hand. Red flag answers will include vague references to social media and content — and community management is not the same as social media.

As an online community manager, you’ll need to have a strong degree of initiative. It isn’t the type of job where you’ll wait for tasks to be assigned to you—more likely, you’ll be determining the necessary actions required to achieve the goals of your new organization. Chances are, you’ll probably have more experience with online communities than anyone else in your organization, so they’ll be looking to you for answers.

In order to be an effective online community manager, you need to have a firm understanding of the pillars of online community management. You might find yourself in a situation where you need to call on that understanding to stand up for yourself and your job. Being prepared with a concrete plan for the future helps establish your purpose and relevance.

All of this starts during your job interview. Since online community managers are leaders before they are doers, it is more than likely that you’ll be interviewed by someone looking for your guidance and initiative to meet the organization’s goals. Here are effective ways to set yourself up for success both during the interview and once you have the job.

In my experience delegating responsibility and authority is crucial. A team needs to be able to develop and grow as individuals and a whole, not be held back by low expectations or ego.
I believe in building a team. Each member of the team should be clear on their role, know where they fit in and feel as though they can depend on one another. I also believe in real-time feedback. If you do something wrong you should know it immediately. Regardless of right or wrong, the further removed feedback is in time, the less effective it is.

This can be a great way to stand out from other applicants and demonstrate initiative. Almost every company will have a website, Facebook page, Instagram account, or some sort of digital footprint. Spend a bit of time doing some online research:

☛ If they have a website, check out their “About us” or “Culture/Mission/Vision” pages.
☛ Who are some of the principal people who work there? Who are the founders?
☛ What sorts of things does this company care about? Do they donate to a particular cause or charity? Which one(s)?
☛ What are their core values? Which of their core values resonate with you?
☛ Has the company been in the news recently or have they won any awards (Social Media can be a great place to find this information).

Many consider this question to be a loaded gun – dangerous in the hands of the inexperienced. Often times, an interviewee will start talking salary before they’ve had an opportunity to illustrate their skill set and value making any sort of leverage valueless. Here, knowledge is power, as salary often comes down to negotiation. Do some research into your industry to establish base rates of pay based on seniority and demand but keep in mind – your employer is hiring you for what they believe you are worth, and how much benefit they feel you will provide.

Measuring community success can be a little tricky at times. It depends on what your community goals are, but there are basic metrics you can keep track of such as member growth, communication engagement rates, and number of members interested in joining. If you’ve managed a community before, share how you’ve measured success in that role, and how it contributed to future success of the community.

A Community Manager who doesn’t know which metrics are relevant to their community and doesn’t know how to measure the success of their engagement initiatives will soon run into trouble. A star performer will have some ideas that are pertinent to your community by the time they meet you for an interview. It’s even better if they ask you who will be viewing the report and devise a custom answer based on that.

Wake up, read theSkimm, check email, check Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook, then walk to the office listening to TED Radio Hour or This American Life.

You’ll find a real-world example to be extremely telling of their social media management experience to this point. Remember, an ideal candidate is a fantastic story teller, so you may be assigning bonus points for a candidate who presents an exciting story.

I’d expect more than just a Twitter/Facebook answer here. A few niche examples suggest they are capable and aware enough to identify the right places to promote your own community and grow your audience. They are also more likely to have been exposed to different management styles which will help them craft something for your community, rather than blindly rehashing something they read in a book or blog (yes, including this one)

If all they suggest are hosted community platforms, you might have a shill. An open-minded and competent community manager will be able to build a thriving space using free tools if necessary, and will most likely respond by asking what the requirements are, as this will dictate the toolset, not the other way around.

The best way to answer this question is to pull from examples of how you’ve built communities in the past. If it wasn’t with a business, that’s OK. Maybe it was a book club, or writing club. The important thing is to take the interviewer step-by-step through the process of how you’ve created, and maintained, a community.

This one is all about job commitment.

Some people make job hopping a career in of itself, and your answer here can be telling. Here, your interviewer is determining if you are:

☛ someone who sets goals
☛ someone who has a vision
☛ someone who is reliable
☛ someone who demonstrates commitment
☛ someone who is loyal

While no interviewer expects someone to stay at a company forever, try and craft your response in such a way that shows progression in your career, and alignment with the Company’s needs and future. Again, self awareness is key – your employer doesn’t want to send you down an unwanted path, resulting in wasted time and energy for everyone.

An innocent question. But a question that if answered improperly, can be a deal breaker. While many individuals will be looking to a new job as a means of increasing their salary, “not being paid well enough at your last job” is not something you want to mention to your interviewer. After all, are you not likely to leave this particular job if you found you could make more down the street?

If you’re currently employed and leaving of your own accord, craft your response around enhancing your career development and a seeking out of new challenges.

Through blogger relations. At my previous position, part of my job was building relationships with bloggers, and that’s how I met Gani. We became friends, and the rest is history. But I do have to thank Heidi Sullivan (SVP at Cision) for pushing me into social media and marketing in the first place!

Even though the role of online community manager is usually pretty broad, that doesn’t mean you’ll be constantly focused on putting out fires. Your main responsibilities will be tweaking the processes of the online community to try and increase participation and get more people through the onboarding process. You’ll coordinate the content that will be added into the community to ensure your customers or members are getting the value and support they expect.

At their best, online community managers wear a lot of hats, but perhaps one of the biggest challenges of the position is continually educating the people around you about the purpose of your role. Since staffing an online community manager is a relatively new experience for most organizations, you will likely have the ability to shape your role, for better or for worse. Taking the time to educate those around you about what you bring to the table can help solidify your position as a necessity.

This question allows the interviewee to tell you about what communities they participate in on a daily basis and why they see themselves being a good fit for your role. This question will also draw clear lines between community folks and interviewees who are simply good on the twitters, can manage a support box like a pro, or can throw a fun party. It’s not that these skills are not important or relevant to being a community manager, but what’s more important is that there are true community skills supporting these efforts.

It’s a common misconception that a social media manager is the same as a community manager. However, being a community manager often involves creating content and interacting with users on social media accounts. Simply being a personal user of Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram is not enough to show that you can manage a brand or business social media presence, if that’s part of what the role you’re interviewing for asks for (many will ask for this, many will not– this is why you need to do the research).

Becoming an expert as a portfolio manager.