Best practices for hiring

Hiring a product manager Hiring practices
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I’m hiring a couple of Senior PMs for my team and this is my first time being the hiring manager.
I will put a business case question to evaluate the candidates. Any recommendations on best practices to follow when defining those business cases?
Would you also make the business case about your product or about a product that they might be more familiar with?

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Generally, I really don’t like business cases. This company was the first where I did them (it was a thing here).

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Here’s the one I used. Big thanks to a friend for helping me think through this. Goals were:

  1. Respect the candidate’s time
  2. Ensure they didn’t think we were asking them to do free work
  3. No tricks!
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So, the general answer to your question is: what do you need to learn about the candidate from the case study/take home? Reduce the assignment to just those things, write down your careful evaluation rubrics in advance, and stick to them.

All that said, I feel like we did a really nice job with the assignment, got great feedback from applicants (had a bunch opt to submit prior work!) and it ultimately had zero impact on our process.

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I have never hired PMs on theoretical business cases. This is because, it is with virtual certainty that they will never encounter that situation at work. Instead, I ask them how they would solve some current problems that they see in the company. That way, I get to understand their framework and thinking.

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Thanks @Amy! These are good points.
I like the content and structure of your case.
I wonder why do you ask them to record a video in advance.
Would you make a yes/no decision based on that video before meeting them?

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I ask them to record in advance because it’s hard to schedule everyone’s time together and presenting to us live during the interview isn’t part of the evaluation rubric.

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But how do you ask follow up questions?

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either I don’t, or I wait until the next round of interviews (we do 2 rounds of 1:1 “screening” calls, then the case, then 2-3 behaivioral group interviews).
Can you share more about the job requirements you have that you’re trying to understand through the case study?

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What I would like to know is that they can

  • define a vision for their product
  • Utilize data in their process
  • Break down the big vision into smaller executable steps
  • Good prioritization skills
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I’m happy to take this offline, or keep talking, but I’m skeptical that a case study will answer many of these. Maybe the third? Could you use behavioral
interview questions instead?

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If they’re senior PMs, couldn’t you just ask them about past experiences? I would imagine you’d be able to suss out how much they contributed to the success of past products.

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In my experience, product cases are useful because they allow you to calibrate across candidates. If every candidate talks about a different product, it becomes difficult to assess what good looks like and who did a better job. When I’m hiring for a PM role, it typically takes about 4-5 candidates doing the case to get a baseline calibration.
Another benefit of cases about your product: It gives the candidate a sense of the problems they’ll solve if they join the company. I can’t tell you the number of times PMs have told me: “After doing this case, I’m more pumped than ever about the company.” It gets them bought into what the company is doing-- which, in a highly competitive candidate’s market, is important. And it’s a great filter for who is truly energized about your company vs. doesn’t find it interesting.
That said, cases are only useful if you set expectations appropriately, give each candidate enough baseline info, and eliminate gotchas. I’d also recommend using a case that hasn’t already been solved / isn’t currently a major area of focus. For example, at Dropbox, we used a case about targeting students and the EDU market. It was on our minds but not one of the company’s top OKRs for the year. If it’s a hot button topic, interviewers might be biased by their own opinions/feelings about it.

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I think it’s great you’ve identified the top 3-5 skills you’re looking for and would agree w others that the business case may or may not be the best way to test for them.

As a product recruiter, I think of testing for these skills through a combination of interview questions (not just me - others in the process might cover a topic they’re best suited to evaluate answers to - ex Engineering asking about the technical aspects of API PM). Behavioral questions are best, and I usually like to spend a few minutes on each story to understand the context and what the individual did (vs the team).

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