Amtec Hiring Guides

How to Hire Quality Managers in Portland

Amtec Hiring Guides

How to Hire Quality Managers in Portland

Current Environment

The field of quality is the discipline and practice of product and service quality assurance and control. In the field of software development, it is the management, development, operation, and maintenance of IT systems and enterprise architectures with a high-quality standard. This definition basically says that quality is “meeting or exceeding customer expectations.

Quality management is the discipline that creates and implements strategies for quality assurance in product development and production as well as software development. Quality directors focus on optimizing product quality, as defined by Dr. W. Edwards Deming.

History

The field of quality assurance in the United States was in direct response to a quality revolution in Japan following World War II. Japanese manufacturers converted from producing military goods for internal use to producing civilian goods for trade.

At first, the reputation of exported Japanese products was not good, and their goods were shunned by international markets. This led Japanese organizations to explore new ways of thinking about quality, implementing a “total quality” approach by changing the focus from improving products to improving organizational processes.

Now, quality assurance is part of most companies that are building products, including digital products and services.

How will Recruiting quality managers Help Your Company?

How will Hiring quality managers Help Your Company?

The hiring of a quality manager can affect both your existing team and your bottom line. A great one will be drawn to details, help with delegation, and help with communication – internally and externally.

Hiring a quality manager will ensure projects are completed properly and on time, according to quality standards, and are staffed appropriately. With a keen eye for detail, people in this role will help to identify when things are not being completed correctly and/or running properly. They will be able to identify existing problems and spearhead efforts to provide solutions. 

A great quality manager hire can help your business increase your reputation as your products will be of the highest quality and will not fail. The manager can also cut down on costs as they can streamline manufacturing processes.

Before we get to exactly how to hire the best quality manager, let’s review some of the details.

quality manager Details

Responsibilities

Quality managers ensure that an organization’s standards for its product or service are consistent. They focus on four main components: quality planning, quality assurance, quality control, and quality improvement. People in this role are focused not only on product and service quality but also on the means to achieve it.

People in this career use quality assurance and control of processes as well as products to achieve consistency. What a customer wants and is willing to pay for it determines quality. It is a written or unwritten commitment to a known or unknown consumer in the market. Thus, quality can be defined as fitness for intended use or, in other words, how well the product performs its intended function.

Quality managers are also responsible for the following duties:  

  • Collaborate with the upper management team to set quality benchmarks
  • Create standards in accordance with industry standards and customer expectations
  • Identify quality control processes to ensure criteria are met at all times
  • Execute tests to check final product adherence to the company standards
  • Record findings and relay this information to the production team
  • Brainstorm ideas to increase productivity and performance of the production line while maintaining accuracy in quality
  • Make crucial decisions in favor of cost-efficiency without compromising on quality
  • Oversee production to ensure conformity in final product processing

Looking for another position? View other positions we place in Portland, Oregon.

Education

Employers prefer that quality managers have at least a bachelor’s degree. While the degree may be in any field, many quality managers have a bachelor’s degree in business administration or industrial engineering. Sometimes, production workers with many years of experience take management and total quality management-related classes to move up. At large plants, where managers have more oversight responsibilities, employers may look for managers who have a Master of Business Administration (MBA) or a graduate degree in industrial management.

Top Schools – US News & World Report rankings

Georgia Institute of Technology, Purdue University – West Lafayette, University of Michigan – Ann Arbor

Top Schools

  • Georgia Institute of Technology

  • Purdue University

  • University of Michigan

Salary Range

quality managers in the U.S.

$65k
Low
$115k
Average
$176k
High
274k

Total quality managers Employed in the U.S.

77.6%

Men

22.4%

Women

quality manager Salary Comparison

National

Quality managers are employed in various manufacturing industries, some of which are expected to have declining employment due to greater productivity. However, because quality managers are responsible for coordinating work activities with the goal of increasing productivity, they will continue to be needed in this capacity. Industries projected to add jobs for these workers include motor vehicle parts manufacturing, machine shops, and pharmaceutical and medicine manufacturing.

Oregon

The average annual salary for quality managers in Oregon was 99k in 2019. The hourly wage averaged $47.66.

For more detailed compensation information for quality managers in Portland, download our free compensation/salary report below.

Working in Portland

Do quality managers find the city of Portland a good place to live and work? There seems to be a large community of people who adore Portland and would never want to live anywhere else. On the other side of that coin, there are things about living in the city that are not rated highly.

The city is a very beautiful place and offers a unique opportunity for outdoor recreation with the ocean one hour west and the mountains one hour east. The city also celebrates open spaces, gardens, and green living.  On the jobs front, Portland has emerged as a tech haven, thus the moniker “Silicon Forest”.

Here are a few other pros for Portland.

Pros

    • Outdoor recreation. In Portland, it’s not event-based. It’s a lifestyle. And the city easily accommodates adventure and exploration with easy access to urban forests, trails, and bike paths.
    • Natural beauty: With Mount Hood towering in the distance, sprawling urban forests, the sparkling Willamette River flowing through the middle of town, and 275 public parks and gardens, it’s a truly beautiful city.
    • Diversity. Portland is also a place of strong character, and the city attracts and welcomes people of the same ilk. After all, an unofficial tagline for the city is “Keep Portland Weird”.
    • Transportation. This Quora exchange explains how one Portlander enjoys the option of walking, biking, taking light rail, bus or streetcar. The options are numerous because the downtown is built densely in small blocks.
    • Jobs. As Oregon’s largest city, almost four times larger than the next largest city, Portland offers the greatest number of job opportunities. Recruitment agency and staffing company services are also available from Amtec for Portland.
    • No sales tax. YAY!

On the other hand, there are a few complaints about living and working in the city.

Cons

    • The weather. For those with Seasonal Affective Disorder, the climate can be a challenge. The city sees an average of 144 days of sunshine, and the other days are cloudy or rainy. and’s climate would not be good.
    • High housing costs. Home purchase costs and rents were rising prior to the pandemic, and that has accelerated due to the low inventory of available homes.
    • Traffic. Although public transportation gets a thumbs up, more people are starting to talk about traffic as an issue in the city.

Current Weather

Not your city? View other cities where we place quality managers.

Demand for quality managers in Portland

Demand for quality managers in Portland

Quality managers will likely face strong competition for open positions, but those who have several years of experience and a bachelor’s degree in industrial management or business administration should have the best prospects. While competition can be fierce, once hired, candidates can expect to be well compensated.

The BLS estimates that the growth of positions in this field will be slower than average, but will still produce a net gain in positions over the next 10 years.

The supply of candidates and demand for open positions have a direct correlation to a company's ability to hire. Download a free Supply and Demand report for quality managers in Portland, Oregon below.

How to Hire the Best quality managers

Finding and hiring the best quality manager candidates can save you money right away and well into the future.

The costs of making a bad hire are well documented. The cost can run as much as 30% of the employee's first-year earnings according to the US Department of Labor. Bad hires can cost a whopping $240,000 in expenses related to hiring, compensation, and retention per The Undercover Recruiter. 74% of companies who admit they've hired the wrong person for a position lost an average of $14,900 for each bad hire according to CareerBuilder. These statistics support our long-held position that behavioral questions are the best way to get to know your candidates and past behavior is the best indicator of future performance.

Recruiting Best Practices

The information below comes from the best practices Amtec uses for finding the highest quality candidates.

Defining the Position

When defining the role you are creating, we recommend a position profile to fully evaluate the position you are hiring for. You must decide if the engineer can work remotely or must work in Oregon. If working in Portland is essential, make sure you include that in your job posting so candidates can decide how many miles they can commute.

How to Source the Best Candidates

When you are looking to source the best quality candidates for your open positions, make sure you have done the legwork to hire an "A Player". You can do this by making sure your company's perspective is aligned with the current market, you have taken into account the job responsibilities, as well as what type of characteristics you are looking for to fit your company culture. Then proceed to write a job posting to attract high-quality candidates.

Characteristics of quality managers

Although the goal of this position is ensuring overall quality, the job cannot impact an organization’s quality alone. Teach others the importance of quality and how low and high quality affects the organization. Invite experts to speak to and teach selected personnel about quality. The newly educated personnel can go to their respective departments and educate others on its importance. Implement monthly best-practice workshops to keep the organization updated on policy and procedure changes, quality programs the company implements, and the company’s quality measures.

How to Screen Candidates

You wrote a job posting, posted the position online, and received a lot more resumes than you’d bargained for! Next comes the enormous task of sorting through those resumes to eliminate the ones that are clearly not a good fit. Now, you have a stack of resumes for candidates who have potential. So how do you go about screening the remaining candidates?

It starts on the phone! As a recruiter, the goal of your telephone screening is to learn more about your candidates. You can confirm that they have the educational qualifications and relevant experience, but you also need to determine if they would fit into your company's culture. To make this job easier, use a system to consistently evaluate results. This way you can equally and objectively compare candidates and evaluate their "soft skills", like communication and thinking process. Download Amtec's Professional Assessment Questionnaire below to help with screening candidates.

Free Professional Assessment Questionnaire

An individually customized questionnaire that helps assess a candidate's competence with written communication skills, thinking processes, and other relevant skills.

How to Interview Candidates

At Amtec, we believe in the power of behavoral interview questions to go beyond the experience and skills listed on the candidate's resume. Although you will want to confirm in the interview that the candidate does indeed have the experience listed on their resume, your assessment needs to go much deeper than that. An interview using behavioral questions can help you determine how well the candidate will fit with your company culture.

Download Amtec's best practices on conducting super effective interviews to find the best candidates and fill your open jobs.

Behavioral Interview Guide

Get the info you need to hire the best quality managers

Free Interview Guide