Laying Foundations: The All-New ProductHired

How It All Began

The ProductHired story begins, like all stories, a little myth here, a little truth there, and much more forgotten than remembered. This story, as I recall began years ago cira 2016 in my search for a product role in San Francisco. I was from Toronto and eager to experience the Silicon Valley dream. I aggressively applied to jobs in the Bay, networked with people online who also had this ambition and eventually flew out there to attend some hackathons. So this is where my story starts. A technology hustler trying to find a product job.

I was able to join a small group of people online doing mock interviews in a slack product community called PMHQ. There I met my future co-founder (though I didn’t know it at the time), Mark Stephan, who was helping lead mock interviews for people interviewing with companies like Google, Facebook, and Amazon. In this group we shared spreadsheets of jobs we applied to, companies we interviewed with, and smart people we practiced alongside; all the while documenting interview learnings which ultimately led to the creation of Open Product Management.

As comrades in the same fields often do, we all felt similar pains. We’d often slip from our mock interviewing into a more thoughtful discussion on how the process to find product jobs was flawed. How recruiters seem not to know what they’re looking for or how roles were incoherent and seemed more like phishing attempts than actual active jobs looking for a candidate. We’d converse into the deep hours of the night how recruiting for product roles could be so much better, and the job search itself requires a skill product managers need to develop.

We found a problem to solve.

The Problem We’re Solving

For far too long, engineering has had the focus of recruiting for technology companies. Building product needs the expert skills and talents of product professionals. In a world where knowing coding languages is relatively straight-forward, Product roles, unlike engineering, are more art than anything. It is the art of problem-solving that is at the heart of product management. However, making this art measurable is difficult, and equally so for recruiters to understand what makes a fantastic product professional. The mission and goal of ProductHired is not only to make finding a job easier for the talent, but also to make it easier for employers to find the right candidate for the job. Because we can focus on both sides of the funnel, with our expertise in the product community, ProductHired is able to hone our tools to match employers and talent better. We mix the science of product with the art of knowing how to do it well.

The ProductHired Product Journey

ProductHired was formed as a fledgling Wordpress site put together with duct-tape, some dreams, and prayers. We’ve spent the last couple of years learning, studying, doing user research, and finally, making it official, we incorporated a year ago on Sept 10th, 2018. Celebrating our 1st birthday, ProductHired has an extraordinary gift for you. All that hard research and work has led us to some bold moves and over a year’s work of design and development.

This past spring, we brought you the ProductHired Job Bot, which posts product jobs into Product Slack communities. Users have loved it as it helped them find roles quicker from a place they keep open on their computer screens, especially during their job search. The first ProductHired Job Bot simply posted links sending users back to our Wordpress site.

Today we introduce the next step in our roll-out.

ProductHired 2.0

Our Wordpress site is gone. Good riddance. Today we are officially launching ProductHired 2.0, a completely custom and brand-new experience replacing our previous site completely. Why a new site? The Wordpress site was always our MVP. A beta that was only meant to inform us of user needs and demand. It was not sustainable, and we couldn’t build off of it. The Wordpress site could not be the foundation of where we wanted to go.

Today with the launch of the all-new ProductHired, we have a strong foundation for an aggressive roadmap we have planned. Great products need firm foundations, and we believe we have delivered that. Is it perfect? No. Over the next few months, you will see weekly improvements. You’ll see features not on any other job site before, and yes, you’ll find new features that every job site has. ProductHired is not only a job site, but we also hope you’ll agree, it’s a career site that you’ll want to come to visit whether or not you’re hiring or looking. Are we there yet? No, but we’ll be there soon.

Come along for the ride and join us. Give us feedback, shoot us an email if you find a bug. There are plenty. But as with any product, we’ll fix them and move forward, aggressively to solve your Product Job pains, as well as our own.

ProductHired 2.0 Features:

• Roles: Product Managers, Product Marketing Managers, Product Owners
• Search over 18,000 Global Product Jobs
• Create Job Alerts (Daily, Weekly, Monthly)
• Save jobs
• Apply to jobs
• Recommended Jobs
• Amazing Filters to hone your search
• Beautiful design, yes, it’s a feature
• Post Jobs
• Job Data: See how many people see, view details, and click to apply to your job
• Promote your Posted Jobs

Over the next few weeks, you’ll see more and more features pop-up.