Pete Warden

I would love to hire PMs with engineering skills on @code, @VisualStudio, and the @Azure dev platform. We have a unique interviewing process that we believe recognizes this kind of talent well. Please redirect them!

Can you talk about what’s unique about it @amandaksilver?

Of course. We subscribe to a lean approach to product development that’s well described in a book written by some of our brilliant user researchers: @tlowdermilk and @JessrichPhD. The book is called The Customer Driven Playbook. http://customerdrivenplaybook.com/ 

Our interview process brings the candidate through a day in the life of a PM on our team - the equivalent to a dev coding with a dev team as their interview.

We have two interviewers in each interview along with the candidate to create a realistic brainstorming session, to ensure we aren’t leading the witness, and to coach junior interviewers.

The day goes through 5 interviews... Customer Segmentation, Problem Identification, Ideation, defining an MVP experiment to test your hypotheses, and Go To Market strategy. A tech interview is also mixed in there.

A few should get credit for developing and defining the approach including @acangialosi, @Johnmont, @karenkayliu, and @nrhalstead.

Rethinking our interview process was one of the most fun activities I've had at Microsoft. I mean, why ask about why a manhole cover is round or how to reverse a linked list when you could give someone a real product problem we're working on to see what fresh eyes make of it?

i failed my google interviews wayyyyy back when :( only got there via an acquistion :)

Things are REALLY hard for scientists. I interviewed, they said thanks, but no thanks. 3 months later recruiter calls and says, well.... maybe they made a mistake, and could I come in for one more set of interviews? Was made offer a week after that.

Yeah. Or just engineers who didn't focus their time on solving toy programming exercises on a whiteboard. It's pretty infuriating.

I feel Google has cared more about precision than recall (even if they get it wrong - great candidates apply again and much smaller chance a great candidate gets rejected randomly) But I don't know if it is true anymore that rejected candidates apply again.

Google HR just informed me 2 hours ago that I haven't made it through. 2 out of 7 interviewers just asked me one convoluted string matching question, with no other question about my education, background, current work etc. This one dimensional interviewing is infuriating.

Interviews are a crapshoot. After interviewing people for 15+ years I decided the only thing I really trust is referrals from people I trust. That never disappointed me and is a lot more reliable that any interview technique

The problem with this approach is, that this makes it much much harder to hire a diverse set of employees. The more diverse your network is, the more diverse is your candidate pool but there will always be a strong bias compared to the open market

My experience with the Goog pipeline: "We get 200 resumes and throw 100 into the trash at random as first step. Nobody wants to work with unlucky people." ;). Seriously, one has to be capable AND lucky.

The risk for top tier companies is hiring a bad worker, not missing out on good people, so they typically err towards not hiring. Definitely not a slight on those not selected.

And I know some of these big companies hiring some really bad people... :)