Effective, Unbiased Hiring for Product Managers in 4 Steps

How we’ve made our interview process as efficient as possible to hit multiple big goals all at once

Several years ago, a then-colleague and friend of mine was bemoaning having to take time away from her work to interview a candidate. At the time, she was the most junior member of her team. She wasn’t sure if interviewing was a job that should fall to her as she learned to juggle the many responsibilities of a client-facing role. 

“But look,” I remember saying to her, “you have the opportunity to weigh in on who you want to work with, who you want to learn from and alongside. Make sure your perspective counts.” 

Hiring is one of the most important decisions your company will make, but it’s also inherently risky. In just a few hours, you’re meant to determine whether someone is not just competent, but aligned with the vision of your company and your team. Plus, you’ll have to meet many candidates to fill just one role, making it an expensive process in terms of time and energy. 

Originally, we had a single interview process, and it was up to the interviewers to adapt it to the person they were interviewing. This meant that there was a lot of room for interpretation: what was appropriate for each level; what skills would best complement the rest of our Practice; what good looked like more generally. While this might appear to be a low-cost method of interviewing, the opposite is actually true. 

Unstructured interviews put a greater burden on our team who needed to prepare a bespoke set of questions before each interview and then write their feedback based on the nebulous and shifting idea of “what they think in the moment”. Often this translates into additional time, creating a lag between making a decision at each stage and informing a candidate, reducing the quality of their experience. But interviewing in this way also has a greater cost to society; there are repercussions to hiring decisions that span communities and, with a broader zoom out, generations:

“If a hiring manager avoids hiring a person of color for a role historically associated with white men because they feel like people of color aren’t qualified, there’s interpersonal racism at play. But there’s also institutional racism at play because this hiring manager doesn’t just represent themselves, but an organization. This is a good reminder that we as people carry great responsibility.” ARD

It’s a message that reminds us we have a part to play that goes far beyond filling an open role in a company.

There is, clearly, a lot going on. We want to hire great Product Managers, make the process efficient internally, ensure the quality of a candidate’s experience is high, and reduce bias to create a diverse team. But how do we turn all of that into actions that align with these multiple goals? 

Here is what we have done in our Product Practice:

1. Interview in ‘Buddy Pairs’

2. Set Up a Dedicated Comms Channel

3. Lead Structured Interviews

4. Don’t Confer

1. We interview in ‘Buddy Pairs’

Getting candidates booked in for interviews with as little back and forth as possible is an important logistical step. Originally our Talent Team would find out when candidates are available, and will then rush to find two PMs who were free at a corresponding time– no small feat between meetings and deep thinking.

So we started with an experiment: what if we matched every PM with someone else who was of a different level and, where possible, other differences (e.g. gender) to increase diversity of the interviewers? We would then ask them to pre-book slots in a Google calendar everyone had access to, so that our Talent Team could go ahead and book over those times without having to ask. 

Our experiment was so successful that not only do we still do this today, rotating the pairs every few months, but it has also been adopted by other Practices.

2. Set Up a Dedicated Comms Channel

Even though we interview in our predefined pairs, sometimes there are last minute requests for other interviewers to step in. These all happen in a Slack channel specifically for the purposes of hiring-related matters, and we also use a Slackbot for CV reviews. This means there is a single place to reach the right audience on this topic, and this topic alone. But note: we always link to CVs in our recruiting software (we use Greenhouse), and do not share personal candidate information in this channel.

3. Lead Structured Interviews

To make sure interview experience is consistent, our prep is minimal, and we are aligned on what we’re looking for from candidates’ answers, we use a set question list and series of criteria, as well as tasks to get an idea of how candidates may perform if they were to come work with us. This helps reduce basing our feedback on our perception of candidates, and instead gives us a way to objectively compare candidates’ responses. 

4. Don’t Confer

This one has quickly become our norm. It used to be the case that the interviewers would come out of an interview and one would say to the other, “What did you think?” The problem with this is it gives too much space for one person to conform to the other’s opinion, or to be swayed away from their views, before making their own thoughts concrete. We want to give space to unique points of view, and then discuss afterwards based on the evidence and how it aligns with the criteria we’ve established. 

We’re still learning, iterating, and improving, but adapting our mindset and our processes has helped us build a strong and enormously talented Product team; one where everyone’s perspective counts.