Job Search Update: Continued Disappointment
Since I kicked off the process of looking for a new job, ideally as a product manager for a major tech company, the results admittedly have been a mixed bag and overall disappointing. Disappointing because I’m still exactly where I started and in hindsight I should have prepared better, sooner than I did.
Today delivered another blow in the form of being notified I would not be proceeding further for one position. It’s for a well-known payments processing company and at least on paper, it seemed like a great fit. They are looking for a project manager in their relatively new payroll product, in which I do have some background during my previous stint at Towers Watson. For example, I still recall the intricacies of data feeds into the HR system during payroll time and pushing those updates to payroll for their subsequent processing. It brought back a bit of nostalgia. And after speaking with the recruiter and with the hiring manager, it seemed an even better fit and I was super duper excited. The position is in San Francisco and the company rapidly growing.
But I was told that they had better matches for the position and hinted that my experience was the culprit. I was shocked and followed up hoping for more feedback — which I’m still awaiting on (and honestly may never receive). The ordeal made me rethink my interview with the hiring manager and what possibly could have gone wrong. Maybe I shouldn’t have been so florid in my responses and spoken slower, or maybe I didn’t emphasize my familiarity with payroll enough. That said and to be fair, she also didn’t ask me particular questions regarding project management or payroll; her questions were general ones directed at my resume content. I think what eats me is not that I failed at some behavioral or technical question, but instead that I answered everything truthfully and to the point.
To go a little deeper, the position was to support a product manager (the hiring manager) to make a push to rolling out the payroll product to all 50 states as well as onboarding new customers. The product itself has only been on the market for 2 years and the team itself is about 25, with 20 engineers and 2 product managers in addition to customer service and sales. From my conversation, it seems like the key competency is tax automation so that customers can process their own payrolls quickly and without hand holding. I regrettably didn’t ask for the timeframe to reach the goal of all 50 states — compared to the current 15 states. It did appear though, that there was various opportunity areas such as expanding analytics/reporting (ala CloudPay) for customers as well as potentially marketing it as a stand-alone product.
Anyhow, this was a good interviewing experience and further opened my eyes to the possibilities in the fintech space. It’s also pushing me to rethink my interviewing responses in the 2nd round to eventually make it out of it successfully.
