Landing a job in product (PM & PD)

Welcome again to the Product Bakery. I'm Christian and I'm here today with my co-host Alex for a usual Monday episode. Hey Alex. Hi Christian, hope you're doing well. Yeah, how is life? Pretty good. It was nice to have some vacation last week. Oh, where have you been? In Bella Italia. Yeah, it was really beautiful. Your hometown. And bars were open, everything was it felt like back to normal. So it was a beautiful week. I was pretty much, I was working from there and but evenings with nice aperitivo and food are beautiful. But happy to be back. Yeah, I remember last time when you came back from vacation, we recorded an episode about cars that were pissing you off. But today it's something different. We were planning for a longer time to talk about landing a job and also hiring product people, product managers, product designers. But before we dive into the conversation, I'd like to highlight as always that you can follow us on social media and also share this episode in case you like it. And beside that, I just want to remind that we have added a feedback survey in the description of the podcast. If you would like to give us some feedback, if you have some ideas for improvements, just let us know. We're happy to take an eye on what you are wanting us to change. So Alex, landing a job as a product designer or even product manager, is it easy or not? Well, it can be easy. I think the good thing is, if I look at the market at the moment, there are so many companies who are trying to hire and don't manage to close the roles. I think generally speaking, also what I hear from recruiters and so on, it's really hard to find people. So in a nutshell, this should mean that if you're looking for a job, it should be super easy to land it. But I think along the way of actually landing it, there is a lot that you can do wrong or that can go wrong. And I think that's a little bit of a problem because at the same time, I do see a lot of people who are saying that they are struggling with finding a job or especially more junior people really have a hard time to get their foot into the door of a company and to land their first role. I agree. I would also like to discuss with you, does it make a difference whether you are a junior person who wants to get started in product management or design versus someone who is more experienced and wants to change jobs? Not necessarily. Of course, you prepare differently if you're a senior designer or you prepare differently if you just want to find your first internship because obviously also the level of experience that you have or that you can show is different. At the end, it always comes down to you have this couple of seconds or let's extend it to minutes where you need to leave a first impression that's good enough so that a hiring manager decides to invite you to talk to them. And that's the first step. And it's the first step for every role, for every function and for every level of seniority, except obviously like you can be headhunted. Then it comes down to your LinkedIn profile. But still, it's always this first impression that you give people where they decide if they want to talk to you or not. Yeah, I agree. There are also people who are struggling with landing the first impression. Maybe we can just start from that point of view. What would make you invite someone? That's hard because when, especially me as a hiring manager, when I look at profiles, it's usually a lot like the very, very, very first impression that really makes the game. So you see a portfolio. How is the portfolio made? When I'm looking at a portfolio of a designer, how does it look like? Like a designer with a, let me call it ugly, or with a portfolio that doesn't like really have the basics of design. That's already a no-go. I probably won't even read what's written on there. If spacings are off, if typography is not working right, if font size is whatsoever, those are the basics. I think when I look at a profile from a product manager or other functions, because they also tend to land on my job, on my table, then it's slightly different. It's more different. It's more around what's the structure? How much did they write on it? Are there clear titles? Do I immediately understand what this person did, what this person is doing, what they're looking for? It comes down to communicate this well. And I think when people fail to communicate this well, it starts like with me challenging, would they be able to communicate on the job? Would they be able to present some work? Would they be able to get a message across? Are they good at also shortening information and giving you an executive summary? And these are all things that you see very quickly when you look at a portfolio, when you look at CV. And that's then a little bit like how I decide, am I interested in spending more time to learn more about this person? And the same is also true for when you're not applying, when you only have your profiles outside in the web, you have a website, you have your LinkedIn page. Also there, it comes down to what's written there. How is it written there? How are you presenting yourself? Because at the end, every hiring manager needs to make fast decisions on this. You cannot invest hours on each person, because with the sheer amount of applicants that you get. Two minutes you have usually, right? Exactly. And sometimes I think it's not fair. I'm pretty sure I lose a lot of talent because I need to make these fast decisions. But then again, it's always on the candidate to prepare it well. And if they don't get the message across, sorry. Would you say it's similar for product positions when you're hiring them? There were a couple of things that you mentioned that are definitely applicable for hiring a product manager as well. So I'm not looking that much into typography, hard word. But so for example, taking a look on what they're writing and how they're writing it is super important. Because sometimes people just describing their previous experiences and their previous roles and what they have done inside the role. And then you read something like manage an international project and grow revenue by 50%. That doesn't tell me anything. Is it good? Is it bad? Was it based on your impact or was it the natural development of the market and the product? So instead of being too high level, I always recommend people just write down what you have done. For example, increasing the conversion rate in the checkout funnel by doing XYZ after analyzing XYZ data. That is something that tells me, okay, this person knows how to explain themselves. It shows me, okay, they have a clear idea on what they are doing and they can also share it and sell it because that's also part of the game. If you argue with stakeholders or founders, you need to be able to give that good exec summary that you just mentioned. And you can already see in the couple of first seconds going through a CV, how someone is articulating and explaining what they have done. And based on that, you're already getting into some bias. And based on that, it's usually a go or no go decision. Yeah. So that's something that I'm taking a big look at, but I'm also recommending people focusing on what's most important. Don't overfill it with information that are not necessarily relevant to product. The main thing is to keep the main thing, the main thing. It's a nice quote that I've learned a couple of years ago. And it starts with the CV. Keep it short, keep it tight, put the relevant information because a hiring manager is scanning for certain things. If I'm, for example, looking for a technical product manager who has experiences in working with cloud services, I'm going through your CV and I'm trying to find information that match to the requirements that we need. So if I can't find anything that is related to, for example, SAS or working with certain cloud functions or any technical things, you're very likely to get dropped out instead of someone who's able to nail it down. And as we're talking about CVs, there's one thing that I want to get out. Yeah. I can imagine what it is, but shoot. One to five stars of an application. Yes, thank you. I hate it. Of a skill of anything that's completely useless. And I think there has been so many people talking about this. If anyone trying to prepare for a job would start reading articles also about it or about companies, by the other hand, they would know that this is a no-go to put on a curriculum. Like what does four out of five Photoshop means? Three out of five prototyping skills mean? That's it's like completely, and you just mentioned it. Take it to what is important. And the same goes for hobbies. The same goes for your first job at Starbucks when you've been like 15 years old. Those are things that don't necessarily matter. There might be cases, if you think it's relevant to tell the story and the Starbucks job or a specific hobby that you're pursuing makes sense, put it on. But only keep the things on there that are important to tell the story why you would be a good employee for this. And one out of five, three out of five, five out of five of something won't tell anyone a story and will probably put you more on the no bucket than on the yes bucket. And I'm the kind of type, if I see, for example, someone writing down with two years experience, five out of five scrum, you can be a hundred percent sure that I'm going to dig so deep into that whole topic of scrum. And it doesn't make sense. What does five out of five mean? Five out of five JIRA skills. Yeah, I know how to create tickets and set up a project. Okay, then let's talk about how you manage a whole JIRA setup in general. And then people are very likely, no idea. Okay, good. But then don't put five on five in. There's always someone who knows more than you. There are also always people who know less, but don't try to measure yourself against something, no matter if it's a belief system or other people just don't do it. I think it has become a little bit the standard. And unfortunately, I feel like designers are part of the reason why most of the CVs look like this nowadays, because that's like templates and they land on Pinterest and so on. But yeah, I won't talk too much about it because I'm just ranting, but yeah, keep it focused, keep it focused, only put the stuff on there that's really relevant and only put things on there that are easy to understand. Yeah, couldn't agree more. And what makes me a little bit sad is, I don't know who it was, but I recently saw, I think it was, yeah, it was Marissa Meyer, the CEO from Yahoo. So she did the same in her CV that she published for her language skills. And I think that's something where I would say it's okay for languages, but generally, so I don't like to see it. So I would really say don't do it. But yeah, it's sad that some role models also try to adapt it. Yeah. But even for language, either stick to standard B1, C1 or stick to, I don't know, use the LinkedIn standard of native professional proficiency entry level. And because that helps me, that helps me as a hiring manager know what can he do. Yeah. Moving on about the whole hiring process and the goes and the no-goes, there's also like a trend going on of mocked interviews. How do you think about that for a job preparation? If you want to get hired in one of the MBBs or big four companies, do them because that's all they want to see, that you prepared for them. But for everything else, I just don't think they will help you necessarily land the job. I think there is better ways to invest your time to get prepared for a job interview. What about you? I think these job interviews or the questions that are getting asked in the mocked interviews, especially from the big companies, they require a very structured way of thinking for a theoretical example. And again, if you want to work there, prepare for it. But 99% of the companies are not Google, Facebook or something like that. So the chance that someone does an interview like that with you is very low. And also I would never do an interview like that, I would never do an interview like that, but you can do something similar. You can take the products from the company that you are applying for and try to break down and analyze it by doing, for example, a signup and during the signup, realizing things that might be not working and breaking that down and writing it down and challenging and asking questions during the interview and proposing some ideas. So that is something that I would love to see. And what I'm realizing is that many people join interviews without even opening up the website. They don't know anything about the product. And what I'm always doing is even as a consult, when I start talking to a client, I'm always checking up their website. Who are the founders? Since when are they in business? What are they doing? How is their LinkedIn profile looking? What kind of hobbies do they have? Are there any YouTube videos online? So just doing some basic preparation is something that is to me a standard, but many people are not doing, which is pretty shocking to me, but that's pure interview preparation. And I think one thing that I would like to bring in here is also like when we talk about preparation, I would like to say it's important to understand for yourself where you want to work, apply to companies where you want to work, do your due diligence as part of it. Because I think what you're describing, Christian, is also a little bit a symptom of people applying to 2000 jobs that are out there with a generic cover letter, where sometimes they, most of the time, they manage to change their company name. Not always. And of course, you won't know how the signup works of the company that then writes back because there's just too many. And that's why I think it's important to, as an applicant, you need to do the same due diligence that I need to do when I hire someone. You need to look at the company, look at the job description. What's in there? What are they expecting from me? Is it realistic? Because also that sort of preparation will help you in the long run find the right job. If the job description is fine, you move on. You look at the company. Do you like what you see there? Do you see some opportunities? Do you see some things we want to follow up to better understand? Why are certain things made the way they're made? And that's like the initial due diligence that you need to do before even sending out a CV. Yeah. And one step before I would even ask myself, in which industry would I like to work? Do I want to be in healthcare? Do I want to be in fintech? Do I want to be in e-commerce? Just ask yourself what you're passionate about. Do you want to build a B2B product or do you want to build a B2C product? And these are crucial questions that you should ask yourself because then you can better target your CV and your skills to what you would love to do. And then I fully agree. Then you have to do your due diligence. But I believe if you rather focus on in quotes quality and narrow a little bit down, it's much more likely that you're going to find a job you really would like to work for. So that's something. And whether you are a junior person or experienced person, I think that's applicable to every level. Yeah. I fully agree. Is there anything else that comes to your mind? Well, one last thing is again, the whole topic of portfolios, because you may ask, should product managers have a portfolio? Yes. That's an interesting question. So I see more and more product manager doing it. And I think it's a good thing. So if there's something that you can highlight, if you are able to show something of your project that you have done, that's great. But in that case, also, like I said in the CV, make sure it's specific. If you have the ability to add, if you redesign something, the state before and the state after, and if you are able to write in short bullet points, why you have made certain decisions based on certain data and the impact of them, that is cool. That's something that is really valuable. Just adding images, just adding the final state without much of a background is not helpful for a portfolio. So these are just my two cents for portfolios in products. But generally it's a trend, but it's not necessary. At the end of the day, I'm always curious about the core skills and the way people are able to sell it on paper. It's actually interesting. I was always somehow feeling lucky that designers, the core of a designer's application is their portfolio. Looking at many different roles in the company, for some roles, it's just very hard to assess them because you only have the CV. At the same time, thanks to portfolios, I know that you can have some super crazy names on your CV, but your work still might not be at a level that I would hire for. So I think hiring managers who hire for jobs that don't rely on a portfolio, it's much harder actually to make very good decisions there. Or you might spend much more time, you might invest much more time into actually interviewing a lot of the people to find out if they're skilled or not, instead of looking at some work examples. Agreed. So I think it's a good closing and we should definitely do a follow-up conversation about the point of view from a hiring manager, because today we focus pretty much on the applicants. So I would say let's continue the chat and see what's important for hiring manager to make the right choices and the right decisions. I would love to talk about that. I'm currently not doing anything else than hiring for my team. Perfect. So information from the source. Amazing. Alex, then have a great day and to all of you, talking to you soon. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.