Test for what can't be learned in three weeks: reading numbers and choosing a priority. Tools can be learned. Someone who reasons well about your data will pick up Shopify faster than you think.
The benchmark
In September 2026, we came across a Cabaïa job posting for an international e-commerce project manager.
It describes the job the way it almost always is described: sales activation across several markets, catalog management, weekly and monthly reports, product launches, A/B tests, and monitoring of the site and the competition.
The listed pay runs from €40,000 to €50,000 a year, within the range Hellowork gives based on published offers, with a median of around €47,500 and a spread of €38,000 to €61,200 depending on experience.
The detail that interests us comes further down, in the hiring process, which includes a live case study followed by a presentation.
The rule
Give candidates a case study on your real numbers, anonymized: one week of data and one page of the site, with three questions. What do you see, what would you do first, and how would you know it worked?
This exercise has an effect you rarely see coming: it tests you before it tests the candidates. To judge an answer to "what would you do first?", you need to have your own.
If you can't say which page on your site costs you the most sales, the person you hire will spend their first months finding out for you, and you'll have no way of knowing whether they picked well.
The steps
- The results. Write down the three results you expect after six months, with numbers where possible.
- The job posting. Build it around those results, and keep the tools for a single line at the end.
- The shortlist. Keep the applications that cite concrete achievements, with a number before and a number after.
- The case study. Run it, then spend more time discussing the choices than listening to the presentation. When we hired a Shopify developer last year, our interview guide had a question we would ask again word for word: "If you had to do it again today, what would you change?" The answer shows whether the person can revisit their own decisions.
- The team. Set up a meeting with the people who will work with the new hire every week.
- The line for leadership
"Until we can write down the three results we expect at six months, we're not ready to hire."
The trap
The most common trap is still the twenty-five-task job posting, which describes several jobs at once and attracts candidates who don't know what you expect of them.
We know this firsthand: our own project manager job description lists twenty-eight tasks in five blocks, from writing specifications to commercial monitoring.
Rereading it for this article, we found almost nothing on what a good year looks like, apart from one line on budgets and deadlines to meet.
Hiring from a list of tools makes the same mistake in another form: it selects people who already know the right screens, without checking that they'll know what to do with what they read there.
