What Qualities You Look for When Hiring a Great Community Manager?

Great community managers are not just social, they are strategic, empathetic and proactive builders. Over the years, I've hired for community roles across early-stage startups and enterprise communities. Following are the top 5 qualities I always look for:

1. Empathy and People Skills

Simply ask:

“Tell me about a time you handled a difficult community situation or a frustrated member. What did you do?”

A good community manager understands how people feel, what they need and how to support them. Look for responses that show emotional intelligence and genuine care, not just the process.

2. Clarity in Communication

Most of the conversations in community are asynchronous. This can led to confusions and conflicts. Whether it's writing announcements, moderating discussions, addressing issues or adding replies on existing threads; the community manager needs to have clear communication.

You may ask the candidate to draft a welcome post for new members. Give them some time to go through the community and about 10 minutes to draft their response.

You'll see if they are able to blend clariy, warmth and professionalism.

3. Ownership Mindset

Community is not a plug-n-play job. A strong community manager thinks like an owner. They bring ideas, setup systems and improve things without instructions. A quick way to check for this ability is to ask:

If our engagement dropped 30% in a week, what steps would you take?

Good CM candidates will show initiative and no panic. They'll strategize every move, dig into data, experiment, ask questions and most importantly - gather member feedback.

4. Content and Event Execution

Try to find if the candidate can design engaging activities. These could be different based on the community platform. CMs will need to design AMAs, Quizzes, weekly themes and even build community content calendar

I like to ask: Tell me about any online campaign you managed or even you've run.

5. Familiarity with AI

This is a new skill; but a good community manager needs to be familiar with AI tools and basic prompt engineering.

You can ask them about the AI tools they've used and can ask them to write a simple prompt to generate ideas for newsletter content. A good community manager will have an above-average knowledge of using AI to generate high-quality text, images and even videos.

Hope this helps.

Thank you, Kaustubh! This is super helpful. I like the idea of asking candidates to draft a welcome post. It's a good test of clarity in thinking and empathy.

I wish to go one level deeper on a few things:

1. On ownership mindset : How do you actually test this during the interview? Can you share a few more questions I could ask during the interview?

2. On empathy: Sometimes people say the right things, but it's hard to tell if they really understand community dynamics. Are there any red flags you've seen where someone seemed great on paper and in the interview; but didn't work out in practice?

Sorry for too many questions! How much does the past community experience matter to you? Would you hire an experienced manager or someone who has shown great instincts and passion but has never built or managed any community?