Read between the lines… 📖
As an organization there’s no doubt you would want to hire only the best for a given job. But, you’d be surprised how conditional filtering deprives you of the very best in spite of having access.
Training! 🎓 A mandatory exercise
I’ve seen ample posts, DMs, queries posted on communities from product people that talk of how they have an access to an allocated personal budget that is offered as a perk by the organization that they are employed at, which ought to be utilized for their own training, development, upskilling.
And, the real question that most people seem to have in common is, what do they spend that on and what area do they need to upskill themselves?
Usually in an open public forum, when all the other type of questions over issues with methodologies, frameworks, workflow, team management seem to garner what could only be termed unexplainably undulated interest at times and the responses seem to flow in from all regular participants, the above question on training doesn’t get to see those many responses from anyone.
Why would that be?
The reason could be pretty simple and that’s because the question of training to upskill is indeed very deeply subjective to one or many of these things:
career graph thus far, spanning all experiences over the past
career moves planned for the future, going ahead
strengths & weaknesses of an individual
the position held by the individual right now
When it may not be right to declare knowledge gained over whatever course as a waste, in the true sense of the word the point here really is about working within the confines of timelines & effectively using those allotted budgets. Without considering these parameters above it could be a futile exercise signing up for training on some (x, y, z) topic which doesn’t directly have a bearing on your job / role / position / growth curve planned.
So, it is more or less established in black and white that training ought to be a mandatory and imperative step toward shaping one’s career at whatever stage one is in.
I am sure many of us have faced many interviews over the course of our careers. Just as much as the space has evolved, so has the hiring methods and the manner in which the candidates are tested for alignment with the job role that they are applying for.
When talking of Tech & Coding roles, may be those hiring procedures haven’t changed much or maybe they have seen some changes that may be miniscule. But, some of the other positions being hired for, especially that of management has changed on its head.
Now I’d like you to give this a serious thought.
Have you ever felt the need to upskill team members, peers over the manner in which they ought to conduct interviews over what they ought to look for and how they ought to be able to probe by popping subjective questions helping them discern inherent qualities one brings to the table?
The answer am sure is skewed towards an “yes” when you ask candidates and may largely be a “no” if you ask the people who have been on the other side, as in the interviewers themselves.
The Boxing Match Correlative 🥊
Referring to the corporate culture prevalent in an organization that spans say about 100 people, there could easily be a minimum of 15 and a maximum of 30 people who would be actively involved in interviewing as a part of the hiring process across various levels.
NOTE: Over watching many recordings (thanks only to the online meeting tools) of actual interviews that have taken place in IT organizations over the course of the year, a noticeable pattern has emerged. More often than not the manner in which questions are asked by the interviewers give the impression that they pit the candidate against a knowledge level that they possess and then score / grade them based on that alone. This is mostly true of Tech interviews.
If the interviewer has judged a candidate on that basis, it is only fair to let the candidate shoot a few questions back on the same subject that may be a result of his prior experience that’s very nuanced and grade the interviewer based on the answers.
And, then total that score out like this:
Paints a gory picture, doesn’t it?
It makes it seem like the interviewer is totally underqualified here in the subject (which again may be far from the truth really).
Please remember that it is not a boxing match where you step into that ring with an intention of knocking the opposition out, come to think of it, there is no opposition here either.
Given the timelines one allots for an interview and given the dynamics of availability of all parties involved as well, one ought to be very concise in questioning, deriving / interpreting and then following it up with more questions meant to drilldown over an area / topic of interest.
This image here is a leap out of the design thinking process showing what it actually means to be empathetic and what factors one ought to work on over developing empathy towards users. I can see a whole parallel over how this concept could be extrapolated and applied to the context of F2F interviews as well.
One ought to really put all intuition together and possess truckloads of empathy over conducting interviews rightly. If he could read between the lines and discern “the why” behind some things being said or have the “presence of mind” to probe, that could be a real winning quality given most F2F interviews.
Reading between the lines
As much as it is said that one must go into an interview with a totally open mind, it won’t altogether be wrong to say that it’s more important for an interviewer to approach the whole situation with some presence of mind.
When candidates give answers, it becomes important to be able to strip it down to the elements over understanding the background, the motivations, the reasons that led to some situations as depicted.
NOTE: Just as much as the candidate has only one chance to prove himself and his mettle, so do you as the interviewer - to get your head down over analyzing whether the person who is sitting there F2F is as qualified / under-qualified / better than what that piece of paper or that single document open on your laptop depicts.
Let’s roll into a scenario to get a better hang of this.
Background:
A growth stage startup organization that has been around for about 2 years now has had a product release with 3 features strategically targeting a couple of user persona of a certain customer segment and a target market. The leadership gets together post directing the teams over conducting a few live experiments understands the market landscape is bright and there for their taking and they only need to pin on few feature releases now. They understand that building engagement on the mobile platform is something of an imperative a little later.
But, at the same time they also understand that it would be better if they had a few PM hires to apportion the jobs equally amongst them as the PMs already on board have their hands full taking care of the other goals set.
Verdict:
The decision was taken to hire some qualified product people and the teams were given the go ahead to hire suitably.
The Interview:
So, a senior product person is interviewing an MBA from a top B-school carrying about 2 years of PM experience in a product-based organization.
Here is a verbatim from one such interview instance.
What’s wrong:
Taking a closer look at the conversation above, it is very evident how the candidate makes a revelation about his failure over being unable to move the metrics as required.
And, what reaction does that set off at the interviewer’s end?
He immediately makes a judgement over the caliber of the candidate by that comment thinking it is really catastrophic and also that prompts him to fill in some negative marks against that column.
Not only that. Circling back to his team / his superiors, if asked he would certainly say that though the candidate looked really impressive on paper, in reality he seemed totally off-color.
Corrective Measures:
1. From the Candidate:
No doubt he was honest, in revealing that he and his team weren’t able to move the needle. But, the sad truth in product is that, honesty could be akin to that lottery you spent US $30 and it fetching a US $2 reward.
Product management is all about being unfettered, unabashed over accepting facts chin-up and taking those challenges head on and trying out multiple alternatives over experimenting, measuring, validating and learning things that could help the entire team discern the best route to take.
Also, if he could have been a little more descriptive over these points, it may have worked well.
NOTE: If the candidate had been this descriptive and deep rooted in thoughts, paving way for more important questions probing the knowledge & experience levels he has, it is possible that things may have been totally different for him altogether.
2. From the Interviewer:
Yes, the candidate didn’t go into a deep dive over his failure. And yes, that could be attributed largely to a mismatch in mentality, mental psyche over playing those crucial and challenging product roles in organizations.
But, given that the candidate was selected and prioritized amongst 100s of other profiles (sometimes 1000s of them too) the interviewer could have just popped a question and it may have given the candidate an opening over initiating that all important probe.
NOTE: Please understand that nobody is right or wrong here. The interviewer may have had to finish some 10-15 interview calls with various people in a day given an urgency over filling in for a position. That may have prompted the reaction of labelling the profile as “off color”. But, that scenario may have led to the team missing out on someone who may have been a great fit.
The interviewer could have considered this option before jumping into a decision of negative marking the candidate.
And, post asking this question if the candidate still doesn’t visit all those points over experimenting, validating, learning, failing & failing fast, moving onto the next route then it perhaps could be a justified decision to not pursue.