How NOT to Hire a Product Manager (PM) Series

The Perfect PM Candidate?

In my career, I have hired or interviewed product managers for different roles in multiple countries and firms. I have also had friends and colleagues attend interviews from PM roles. There are many ways to select someone for a PM role. Unfortunately the process does not work perfectly every time.

For startups hiring PMs, or firms setting up a PM team, you must avoid certain pitfalls. In the next few blog postings, I will talk about real experiences of people as they tried to hire PMs or candidates who interviewed for the role of a product manager.

 

BTW, there are many articles available online on how to hire a technology product manager. Here is one link from Ken Norton, link to a medium.com article, and here is another one from productplan.com. You can review these if you are planning to recruit a product manager for your team or startup.

Keep reading this blog for more posts in this series.

 

Phone interviews can rejected valid candidates due to 7 reasons

In India, a common and costly mistake by the recruiting team in MNC R&D centers or Indian firm is arranging a candidate's phone interview with a peer product manager. This is seen as the first bar to clear, before a full day interview is arranged with multiple people.

The common issue with this process is that it does not account for an interviewer's bias, which often leads to rejection of a perfectly valid candidate. 7 common pitfalls that hamper phone interviews include:

• Short listing candidates from the same school or former employer as the interviewer, while rejecting others
• Rejection of a brilliant candidate due to fear of competition 
• Misuse of informal networking to pre-judge the candidate in his current role
• Rejecting candidates because the panelist is not trained properly
• Rejecting candidates not referred by existing employees
• Rejecting candidate referred to by existing employees
• The interview is just a formality to complete the process, candidate’s resume is already rejected by the hiring manager

There are more, but if you have experienced rejection in PM phone interviews, you are not alone. Many fully qualified candidates continue to get rejected for inane reasons.

Resume Variants You Need as a Technology Product Manager

Most interview preparation sites will say that you need to customize your résumé for every job application. This is correct because if your customized resume does not contain keywords a recruiter is searching for, you are unlikely to get shortlisted for an interview. However, what they often neglect to mention is the need for multiple resume templates for applying to product management roles in India. This is even more important once you gain some years of experience in product management.

[In large firms, your résumé is typically scanned by a recruiter, shortlisted by an HR manager, forwarded to the hiring manager and then scanned by the interview panel. It may also be scrutinized by a background checking team after you accept the job offer]

You should remember some points while creating a resume template for each category. Remember, the template is the master list of all work related activities, you need to trim it and customize it for every job application.:

Offshore Enterprise Product Management

• Highlight cross-functional, program management and engineering work experience
• Show details of customer and account team engagement or work as a Business Analyst
• Add keywords that match the technologies advertised (security, virtualization, networking etc.)
• Based on the job description, you may want to highlight work done within Asia-Pacific for sales support, RFP response and so on

Offshore Consumer Product Management

• Show patents, innovations, work on new product design etc.
• Show experience in UX design, product release etc.
• Also mention if you have conducted customer interviews, done customer data analysis or have worked with web analytics

Market Facing Enterprise Product Management

• Show financial skills (you can decide what flavor you wish to add)
• Show pricing, sales support and marketing experience
• Add points to show that you are tech. savvy (but you need not show engineering experience)

Market Facing Consumer Product Management

• Show brand names you have worked with
• Show impact on profitability, sales, customer acquisition or other relevant metrics
• Add details of your MBA projects, data analysis skills and interpersonal skills
• Add details of team management if done earlier

Your résumé is the key to your success in the technology industry in India.The reviewer must grasp the essentials in a single glance to retain his interest. 

And remember, there is no such thing as a catch-all resume that can be used for applying to any product management role.

10 Reasons why "MBA preferred" appears in Product Manager recruitment ads

This is a very old post from my previous blog, reposted as it is still relevant.

10. The recruitment team wants to shortlist candidates from thousands of applicants for an entry-level role, and MBA/PMP is chosen as a criterion. This is fairly common in large firms.

9. The Product Manager is actually required to have business modeling/statistical analysis or product pricing/marketing skills. This is very rarely needed in India, for both offshore roles and for Indian market facing roles.

8. The "MBA preferred" lets the recruitment team decline internal applicants who want to move out of an engineering role into product management.

7. The head of product management/hiring manager has an MBA

6. This product management role reports to the local sales head, and it is actually a category/brand management role for India/Asia-Pacific. Such roles are quite prevalent in hardware/mobile firms.

5. The role requires the product manager to work with vendors/clients/account teams etc. based in India, and a person with an MBA might have an edge in relationship building and management, as per the hiring manager.

4. The ad wants applicants with a full-time MBA from a top business school, but the recruitment team was not sure if they would actually get many applicants. This is often the case with senior level positions.

3. The PM head wants a "business oriented" product manager, even though the role is actually completely engineering facing, and requires strong domain knowledge. This often happens in offshore R&D centers, and often leads to a bad hire.

2. The "MBA preferred" can be interpreted as a code for highly paid candidates to apply for the job.

1. (My favorite) The ad was copied from a standard template and it contained the words "MBA preferred" in the original ad.

What's your Compa-Ratio?

A product manager's CTC (cost to company) can have many components, which are mainly broken down into the following:

• base salary
• variable pay
• retirement benefits
• stock (ESPP, RSU, Stock Grant etc.)
• bonus (joining, annual, shipping bonus etc)

Knowing that there are so many CTC components makes it difficult to evaluate competing job offers or even "quote a salary", as is commonly demanded by recruiters these days.

For offshore product managers, one way to benchmark your salary is to find out your compa-ratio at your firm. The Wikipedia link has the basic explanation of what a compa-ratio is, and how it is applied during recruitments and performance appraisals. In a large firm, this is the direct way to find out if you're paid above average, at par, or below average. And actually, this also has a good correlation to your past performance, your relationship with managers and the industry performance as well. So knowing or guessing your compa-ratio puts you in a good situation during the salary negotiation time both within the firm or when you have an offer in hand.

For startups, smaller firms or Indian technology firms, you might not find this information from your HR contacts. In this case, one alternate is to trawl the web with queries such as "salary for X role" in "City Y" [ I get some traffic on the blog from these queries too!]. And thankfully, there is quite a lot of reasonably accurate information on this available in 2013, compared to the situation five years ago. These give some pointers on the potential offer, given your current compensation, the industry standards and the salary at the company in question.

One final thought, given the limited risk-reward situation in high-tech product management, it would be wise to only compare base salary as a lump and all variable components as another lump.

Who's the Hiring Manager?

Based on the number of calls from recruiters these days, it looks like the Product Manager hiring season in India is on in full swing. However, one simple question makes it easy to identify which firms are likely to have a long and tedious recruitment process for a PM role, and which ones are really keen to hire new people.

And that question is a simple one...

"Who is the hiring manager for this role?"

Now some recruiters will hem and haw, while others will say we simply look for a fit between candidate and company (many internet firms still try this line). It's very simple, if they are not able to give you a credible answer, then there is something very wrong with the picture. They can hide the compensation range and ask all details from you, but this is a very important question that the recruiter must answer. Actually, they should give full details on who is the hiring manager, what job grade the role is at, and which business unit is hiring.

I have observed that some startups and a few teams in large technology MNCs do try to be secretive, saying that they would reveal these details after you join them. And the recruiters also seem to avoid replying to this question. Well, that's like buying a pig in a poke. No matter how good the brand name, you can still mess up your job change, and negatively impact your career.