COO Job Description Template 2026

Last updated: October 3, 2026

By Mike Carter, Managing Director, KORE1

A COO job description should list the functions moving to the seat, the three or four operating numbers it will be judged on, and the dollar amounts it can approve without the CEO. On our searches a private or mid-market COO’s base falls between $175,000 and $400,000, and bonus plus equity lift the total to $250,000 to $700,000. Strong operators read a posting for what is being handed over, and most postings never say.

Thirty-one bullets. We counted them on a COO posting a contract manufacturer in Grand Rapids, Michigan, asked us to look at last spring. Nearly every one started with “oversee,” “drive,” or “champion.” Not one contained a number. Not even a headcount.

The company stamped and assembled metal parts for automotive and office furniture customers, ran three plants, and did about $140 million a year. Its CEO had already put the posting in front of a candidate he liked, a vice president of operations at a Columbus, Ohio, distributor who had run four buildings and a fleet. She read all thirty-one bullets and asked one question on the call. What could she approve without phoning him?

Twenty-five thousand dollars.

She asked what the plant managers could approve. Fifty thousand. Somebody had raised their limit years ago, after a press went down on a Saturday and nobody could reach the owner, and nobody had touched the matrix since. So the person being hired to run the plants would have needed permission for purchases the people reporting to her could make on their own. She was polite about it. Gracious, even. She withdrew the next morning.

He hadn’t meant any of it. The CEO had founded the company, and in his head the COO would obviously get real authority once trust was built. The posting just never said so, and a candidate who already had a good job had no reason to find that out after accepting.

We rewrote it in June. Plants, supply chain, quality, maintenance, and safety would report to the COO, and sales and finance would stay with the CEO and CFO. Four numbers went in, each with the current figure beside it. On-time-in-full was running 91%. Scrap sat at 4.1% of material cost. The approval limit became $250,000 for budgeted capital and $500,000 a year on any single vendor contract, and the COO could hire and remove directors. About 800 words. Three finalists, and the company made its hire nine weeks after the new version went out.

Full disclosure from my side of the table. Our revenue comes from placements like this one, and I’m the managing director here. The self-interest is plain. Our COO staffing and executive search team works these searches. If you’re still deciding whether you need a COO at all, or which kind, start with our guide to hiring a chief operating officer, which takes the reasons for the seat one by one. What follows is narrower. It’s about the page itself.

Draw the Org Chart Lines First

Candidates skip to the reporting list. I’ve watched them do it on screen shares, scrolling past the company boilerplate to find out who’d be theirs. A CFO knows roughly what lands on the desk before reading a word, because accounting looks about the same at every company. A COO doesn’t. The seat holds whatever the CEO decided to let go of, and in our searches that has ranged from two warehouses and a dispatch desk to eleven plants, IT, and HR.

Print the handover, then. Function by function, with the exceptions.

People skim the middle column. The right-hand one is where operators slow down, since anything the CEO keeps is something the two of them will eventually disagree about. Pricing is the classic. A founder who still sets prices while the COO answers for margin has built an argument into the org chart, and a candidate would rather hear about it now than in month four. “Sales, pricing, and product roadmap remain with the CEO.” Nine words. Done.

Dotted lines belong on the page too. Maybe the plant controllers report to the CFO but sit in the COO’s buildings. That’s common, and mostly fine. Plenty of good operators will sign up for that. Nobody likes learning it at the first month-end close.

Grade the Job in Its Own Numbers

“Drive operational excellence” is the most common sentence in COO postings we receive. It means nothing, and the candidates you want know it means nothing.

Every operations job is graded on a short list of figures, and the list depends on what the business does. Name yours. Better still, print where each one stands today, even when the figure is ugly, because the gap between today and target is the job description in one line.

Three or four. Not eleven. Pick. A posting that lists eleven metrics tells a candidate the CEO hasn’t decided what matters yet, and that the COO will be graded on whichever one went red most recently.

A third-party logistics company in Chattanooga learned that the expensive way. Its posting promised the new COO would own “all KPIs across the network.” The person it hired came from a big parcel operation and spent her first two quarters pulling cost per order down by almost a dollar, which was real money across four million orders a year. Then the founder’s review led with order accuracy, which had slipped half a point while she was cutting cost. Nobody had told her accuracy was the number the largest customer’s contract was written around. A single line in the posting would have covered it, and she said as much on her way out, fourteen months in.

Put the Approval Limits in Writing

Most companies past a certain size keep a delegation of authority matrix. It’s usually a spreadsheet, owned by finance, that says who can approve what and up to how much. Capital purchases, vendor contracts, hires, write-offs, settlements. It is also, very often, the least maintained document in the building, as Grand Rapids found out.

Pull it out before you write the posting. Then decide what the COO’s row says, and print the parts a candidate will ask about anyway. Experienced operators ask about approval limits on the first call because they’ve worked under someone who kept every decision above a few thousand dollars for themselves, and it’s the one condition that makes the job impossible no matter what the title says. Your answer says more to them than the thirty-one bullets did.

Four rows cover most of it. Maybe five. Capital spending inside the approved budget, and the dollar line above which it goes to the CEO or board. Vendor and customer contracts, by annual value. Hiring and removing people, by level, and especially whether the COO can replace a plant manager or a director without a second opinion. And unbudgeted spending, the one that tells a candidate whether a broken machine on a Saturday is their problem to solve or yours.

Not sure what the numbers should be? Start from what your plant managers or regional directors can already approve. The COO’s limit has to sit above theirs. I’m a little embarrassed that this needs saying, but we see the inversion more often than you’d guess, mostly at founder-led companies where limits got raised one emergency at a time.

Plants Add a Safety Record to the Read

If the company runs plants or warehouses, the candidate is going to look at your injury record before the first interview, and they don’t need to ask you for it.

Here’s why. Under OSHA’s recordkeeping rule, the annual injury and illness summary each establishment posts, the Form 300A, has to be certified by a company executive. The regulation, 29 CFR 1904.32, limits who that can be. An owner, but only for a sole proprietorship or partnership. An officer of the corporation. The highest-ranking company official at the establishment, or that person’s immediate supervisor. At a company with a COO over the plants, that signature often ends up being the COO’s. Candidates from manufacturing know this. Most of them, anyway. They’re reading your posting as people who may soon be certifying your numbers.

And the numbers are public. Anyone can look. OSHA publishes establishment-level 300A data collected through its Injury Tracking Application from covered workplaces, going back to 2016, by name and address. A finalist for a COO seat at a food processor in Boise pulled the company’s two plants, divided recordable cases by the hours worked the summary itself reports, and came to the second interview with a rate for each building. One plant ran nearly twice the other. The CEO hadn’t known. Nobody had. That candidate is now the COO, partly because he was the only one who asked.

Leave the injury rate out of the posting if you like. Just read your own data before a candidate does, and if safety and EHS move to the COO, say so in the reporting list rather than leaving it implied.

Pay, Posted Ranges, and the Filing After a Listed Hire

Start with what offers look like. A private or mid-market COO on our searches takes a base somewhere from $175,000 to $400,000, and the full package comes to $250,000 to $700,000 with bonus and equity in. The annual bonus is commonly set at 30% to 60% of base. Tie it to the operating numbers you just printed. Nothing else makes sense. Our COO salary guide breaks that out by company type, public company included. I won’t repeat it.

Federal data is a weak guide for this seat. It does explain one pattern, though. The Bureau of Labor Statistics counts general and operations managers separately from chief executives. As of May 2025 the median wage was $105,770 for the first group, which holds roughly 3.5 million jobs, and $213,990 for the second. Plenty of people with “operations” in their title sit in the first group. When your posting says COO but describes a single-site operations manager, those are the applications you’ll get, a few hundred of them.

Print the range. Several states now require it. New York’s version, Labor Law Section 194-B, covers any employer with at least four people on staff, requires the posted range to be one you believe is accurate at the time of posting, and requires saying so when a position is paid on commission. California, Colorado, Washington, and Illinois each run their own rules. Check the ones where you’ll post, then print base plus the bonus target as a percentage. If you want a first read on a figure for your city and size, the salary benchmark assistant gives one in a couple of minutes.

Listed companies have one more thing to plan for, and it affects how confidential the search can be. When a registrant appoints a new principal operating officer, Item 5.02(c) of Form 8-K requires disclosing the person’s name, position, and start date, their background, and a short summary of any significant pay arrangement struck for the appointment, generally within four business days. In other words, the offer letter’s main terms become public. Finalists from public companies expect it. Ones from private equity portfolios sometimes don’t, and they should hear it from you before the offer goes out, not from the press release after.

COO Job Description Template

Replace everything in brackets. Lines in parentheses are notes for whoever is drafting, and they get deleted before the draft leaves your desk. If a section doesn’t apply, cut it. Don’t stretch it to fit.

Title

[Chief Operating Officer / President and Chief Operating Officer] (Add president only if sales reports to this seat or the CEO is stepping back from day-to-day leadership. Otherwise leave it off.)

The Company Today

• [What you make, sell, or deliver], for [customers], from [N] [plants / warehouses / offices] in [locations]
• Revenue of about $[band], [growing / flat / recovering] at [N]% a year
• [N] employees, about [N]% of them hourly
• Owned by [the founder / a private equity firm since 2024 / public shareholders]
• [The one thing changing in the next two years, such as a third plant, an ERP replacement, or an acquisition to integrate]

What Moves to You

• [Plants and production / service delivery]
• [Supply chain, procurement, and logistics]
• [Quality and continuous improvement]
• [Safety and EHS]
• [IT and business systems / HR] (Only if true from day one.)

[N] direct reports. Reporting line is to [the CEO], with attendance at board meetings [quarterly].

What Stays Where It Is

[Sales and pricing remain with the CEO. Finance, including plant controllers, reports to the CFO, with a dotted line to you.] (Write this section even when it feels awkward. Candidates will ask.)

The Numbers You Answer For

• [Metric], [today’s figure] now, [target] by [date]
• [Metric], [today’s figure] now, [target] by [date]
• [Metric], [today’s figure] now, [target] by [date]
• [Operating budget of $[amount] and headcount of [N]]

What You Can Approve

• Capital spending up to $[amount] per project inside the approved budget
• Vendor and customer contracts up to $[amount] a year
• Hiring and removing [directors / plant managers / all roles below VP]
• Unbudgeted spending up to $[amount], reported to the CFO [monthly]

Year-One Outcomes

• [A target from the list above, such as OTIF of 95% for two consecutive quarters]
• A weekly operating review the leadership team actually uses
• [A structural result, such as the second plant running on the same ERP and the same scorecard as the first]
• [A people result, such as a named successor for each plant manager]

Background That Matters

• Ran operations at a company of roughly $[low] to $[high] in revenue, with [N] or more sites
• Owned the numbers above, or ones close to them, and moved them
• Led managers who led managers
• [Industry experience, only where it truly shortens the learning curve, such as FDA-regulated food production or aerospace quality systems]

Helpful, Not Required

• Lean or Six Sigma training, used on a real floor
• Experience on [your ERP, such as SAP, Oracle NetSuite, Epicor, or Microsoft Dynamics 365]
• [Private equity hold / public company] experience, if that’s your ownership

Compensation and Location

Base pay $[low]-$[high] (write it as a range), with an annual bonus target of [N]% of base, measured on [the operating numbers above]. [Equity / profit interest] included. Based in [city], on site [N] days a week, with travel to [sites] about [N]% of the time. [Listed companies add that the appointment and its compensation terms will be disclosed publicly.]

What Founders Ask Before Posting It

President and COO, or just COO?

Just COO, unless sales reports to the seat or the CEO is genuinely stepping back from running the company day to day.

The president title signals the second scenario to every candidate who reads it. Use it when the job is the job, not as a closing tool. If you want a sweetener, the approval limits do more work than the extra word.

Do we have to say this is the successor seat?

Say it only if the board has agreed to it, because a succession promise in a posting becomes the first thing every finalist raises in the last round.

If it’s possible but undecided, leave it off and say so honestly on the first call. Candidates handle “maybe” well. They handle a quiet retraction in year two badly, and they tell people about it.

A candidate asked to see our delegation of authority matrix. Normal?

Completely, and it’s a good sign about the candidate, since experienced operators have learned that approval limits decide whether a COO title comes with a COO job.

Share the COO’s row after the first interview. The whole matrix can wait for finalists. If you don’t have one written down, that’s worth fixing before the search, not during.

Should the requirements include an MBA or a Six Sigma black belt?

Neither belongs in the requirements, and either is fine listed as preferred, because the operators you want are proven by numbers they moved, not by credentials.

A black belt who has never run a P&L isn’t the hire. A plant manager with no certificates who took scrap from 6% to 2% might be. Put the credential where it can help a candidate without screening out the best one.

How long should a COO job description be?

700 to 900 words is plenty, and most of those words should be numbers, names of functions, and dollar limits rather than duties.

Ours for Grand Rapids came in around 800, down from roughly 1,300. Shorter wasn’t the goal. It just happened once the “oversee” bullets went.

Our current COO hasn’t left yet. Can we post at all?

Not publicly, in most cases, since a posting for a seat that’s still occupied tends to reach the person in it within a week.

Write the full description anyway and use it privately. A search firm can run the search confidentially, and our COO search page covers how replacements without a public posting usually work. If you need someone in the seat sooner than a permanent search allows, a fractional COO can hold it while you look.

Read It Like the Operator You Want

Before it goes out, hand the draft to your best plant manager or regional director and ask them one thing. Would you take this job, as written? They’ll find the missing approval limit, the metric nobody agreed on, the function that’s half in and half out, faster than any of us will. Then fix what they found. All of it. When finalists arrive, our list of questions to put to COO finalists picks up where the posting leaves off. If you’re writing the finance seat’s posting next, our CFO job description template handles the side of the house the COO works closest with, and the chief revenue officer template covers the seat that usually keeps sales.

KORE1 opened its doors in 2005, out of Irvine, and today works thirty-some metro areas. The recruiters on our executive desk have 15-plus years apiece, on average. Averaged over everything we fill, a role closes in 17 days. COO searches run longer than that, typically three to five months, and almost always as a direct hire through our executive recruiting firm. One year out, 92% of our placements are still there. If you’d like an operator’s eye on your draft before candidates see it, send it to our search team. We’ll tell you which line a finalist would ask about first.