A recruiter posted recently about great manufacturing leaders who interview badly. I commented that I’m one of them. Then I sat with why.
My whole career has been small shops — under 20 employees — and international manufacturing startups. My value has never been talking about the work. It’s been doing it: walk into the chaos, put my hands on it, build the team, set up the vendors, write the policy nobody’s written yet. I observe, I know what needs to happen, I do it. Talking about it after the fact has always felt like homework.
Big companies run on a different operating system. There’s hierarchy. There’s an onboarding plan for how you’re supposed to learn the job. There’s a lot more talking than doing. And there’s a language — a dense, company-specific shorthand of acronyms — that you’re expected to already speak before you’ve set foot on the floor.
Corporate Has Their Lingo
And nobody hands you a dictionary
Every large manufacturing company has its own internal vocabulary layered on top of the industry-standard one. If you didn’t grow up inside a specific company or a specific consulting pedigree, you’re translating in real time during the interview — while also trying to sound confident.
A partial glossary, for anyone hiring or interviewing in operations right now:
- OEE – Overall Equipment Effectiveness (the availability × performance × quality math that lives on every plant dashboard)
- TPM – Total Productive Maintenance (not to be confused with technical program manager, a different TPM entirely at tech companies)
- SMED – Single-Minute Exchange of Die, i.e., changeover speed
- 5S – Sort, Straighten, Shine, Standardize, Sustain
- DMAIC – Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control (the Six Sigma spine)
- PDCA – Plan, Do, Check, Act
- SIOP / S&OP – Sales, Inventory, and Operations Planning (some call it S&OP, some SIOP, same animal)
- JIT – Just-In-Time inventory
- WIP – Work In Process
- RCA – Root Cause Analysis
- CAPEX / OPEX – Capital vs. operating expense
- EBITDA – Earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization
- ANDON – the visual stop-and-alert system on a line
- POKA-YOKE – error-proofing a process so a mistake becomes physically impossible
And that’s before you get into the acronyms that only exist inside one specific company’s four walls — the internal name for their ERP module, their quality system, their leadership framework — that show up in interview questions as if they’re universal.
If you don't know the word, you can't answer the question. Not because you don't know the work. Because you don't know the vocabulary the work got translated into.
Why "Just Ask" Isn't Simple Advice
Especially if you’re a woman in the room
The obvious response is: ask what it means. In practice, that’s a harder ask for women than men.
Research on classroom and conference question-asking found women report far more internal hesitation about speaking up than men do — not lack of time, not lack of opportunity, but the fear of looking unprepared in front of the room. Separately, a multi-year study of university hiring-panel interviews found female candidates were interrupted more and hit with more follow-up questions than male candidates with comparable credentials — a pattern researchers described as a “prove it again” dynamic that persists regardless of the CV in front of them.
Stack those two findings on top of a room full of unexplained acronyms, and you get a specific trap: the moment you ask “what’s SIOP?” is the exact moment some interviewers quietly downgrade you, while your male counterpart asking the same question is more likely to be read as simply curious.
Nobody teaches the vocabulary. Then the not-knowing gets scored as a competence gap instead of what it actually is — an exposure gap.
The Real Miscalculation
Small company doesn’t mean small candidate
Here’s the assumption I want hiring managers to drop: that someone from a 15-person company is somehow less prepared than someone from a 15,000-person company.
It can be the opposite. Small companies don’t have enough people to spread the work across. There’s no layer to hand the ambiguous problem to. The person who’s spent five years at a small manufacturer has, by necessity, done recruiting, built vendor relationships, written the policy, walked the floor, and fixed the line — often in the same week. Someone who understands each department as an individual piece but who also sees the big picture once the pieces are put together.
That’s not a lesser résumé.
That's a workhorse's résumé, built out of necessity instead of title.
This is exactly why I’m writing this. Despite a résumé showing results from organic growth in a small factory, most of these candidates usually walk into the interview already braced for an uphill fight — aware, even before they sit down, that the résumé line “20-person manufacturer” will be read as less-than by someone whose résumé says “Fortune 500.”
I’ve been there and still am there: I don’t put my past company’s sizes on my résumé for that reason. And trust me, when a hiring manager asks me, “So how many people have reported to you?”, I ready myself for ‘that’ look that I tend to get when I honestly answer the question. Judgment is passed, and I am not surprised when candidates choose to embellish some of their answers so that they fit a mold.
Now hand that same candidate a room full of unexplained acronyms. They’re not just proving they can do the job. They’re doing that while fighting a misperception they didn’t create, in a vocabulary nobody taught them. That’s not a fair fight. That’s two uphill battles stacked on top of each other.
The Job Description Conundrum Nobody Names
Bachelor’s required, master’s preferred, please still be scrappy
To be clear: I don’t knock the degree. There’s real value in that discipline, and in another life, I might have gone that route myself. But a degree is a credential, not a guarantee — it doesn’t make someone a good leader, and it doesn’t mean they contribute more than someone who grew up through the ranks, learned the floor by walking it, and built judgment the slow way, one problem at a time.
Here’s the part companies don’t want to look at directly: almost every manufacturing leadership posting at a mid-size or large company asks for a bachelor’s minimum, a master’s preferred, a certification or two — and then, in the same three bullet points, wants “hands-on leader, comfortable on the floor, leads by example.”
That’s not a job description. That’s a BOGO deal nobody agreed to fund. You’re asking for the credentialed candidate and the scrappy operator, and pricing the role like you only need one of them. You can’t demand both skill sets and pay for one. Pick which one you’re actually buying.
I’ve written about job descriptions before, and not much has changed at scale — most companies still write JDs by copying the last one and adding a line. But the good ones do think about this. They look at their own posting the way a candidate would and ask what it’s actually screening for, versus what it’s just always said.
What I'd Ask Hiring Teams To Do
Read your own job posting like an outsider!
- Read the posting cold. If you removed the company name, could someone from a 20-person shop understand every line? If not, you’ve written a filter, not a job description.
- Decide what you actually need. A degree, or the judgment a degree is supposed to signal? Those aren’t always the same thing — and it’s easy to hire the diploma instead of the human and the talent sitting in the room.
- Open with the glossary, not the gate. If your interview process depends on internal acronyms, hand candidates a one-page cheat sheet before the conversation. Fluency in your internal code isn’t the skill you’re hiring for.
- Ask about outcomes, not vocabulary. “Tell me about a time you reduced changeover time” gets you further than “walk me through your SMED experience.” Same question. One excludes people who did the work without ever calling it that.
- Notice who you’re interrupting. If you wouldn’t ask a man three follow-ups on the same point, don’t ask her five.
- Open with a genuine kudo. Point to something specific and real on the résumé before you get into the questions. It costs you nothing, and it tells the candidate they’ve been seen as a person before they’re tested as a vocabulary quiz. That alone takes some of the edge off.
Hiring is overwhelming on both sides of the table — nobody’s pretending otherwise. But the point of writing this isn’t to make anyone feel bad about the process. It’s to raise awareness about who’s actually stepping into that interview ring, and to level the playing field enough that the right talent gets heard and seen instead of discarded because their background was “small beans.”
The recruiter’s post that started all this was about great operations leaders who interview badly. A lot of those “bad” interviews are preventable — not by coaching the candidate harder, but by the bullet points above.
Most hiring teams have never had to think about which of their own words might be the wall.
It’s not malicious. It’s just a blind spot that’s easy to have when the language is the water you’ve swum in for years. Naming it is the whole fix.
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