Speed Interview Event at LinkedIn
On March 3rd, Women in Product celebrated the International Women’s day in an amazing way by partnering with LinkedIn to organize mock interviews for women who are transitioning to new career. The interviewers are experts and specialists from LinkedIn offering interview sessions in four different fields: Product Management, Business Development, Design, and UX research. Having no experience of interviewing for PM roles, this is really a rare opportunity for me and many other attendees to have someone help tackle the tough interview questions.
The interview format was strong and yet impressive: at an open space in a room, each “candidate” would be matched with 3 interviewers of the field that they opted in for 15 minute each for interviewing followed by 5 minutes for feedback. This way of organizing the interviews has proved its benefits to the interviewees through many ways:
- Interviewees will receive feedbacks from different angles of their background and from different perspective. A PM candidate shared that she got questions and feedbacks from 3 interviewers on 3 different area of her resume — data analysis, product management experience, and customer research.
- During when candidates were moving between two different tables for the next session, they had a chance to reflect the newly given feedbacks based on which they can twist their answers to the questions of the next interviewers to testify how “improved” their answers are.
- Candidates can hang around during waiting time moving between tables to socialize
- 5 minutes feedback is also a chance for candidates to clarify some grey areas or to ask for some resources for next steps. One candidate of UX research shared with me that the interviewer even amazingly shared with her some suggestions of books, courses and projects that she could work on to gain more experience during her transition to UX.
3 interviewers that I was matched with gave me friendly yet straightforward feedbacks and made a genuine attempt to help improve my answers. Now I keep in mind what they have advised:
Sara Todd:
- However good your resume is, try to tie your skills to what a PM role needs (for example: I used to work as a salesperson which could be tied to the PM’s ability of pitching ideas well to people)
- When answering product sense questions, don’t mix product features and company image into your answer. Just focus on product itself only.
Mitali Pattnaik:
- Product question: Mitali helped to point out for me that A/B testing is a very critical part of product question and I need to practice more on that. She also went beyond my expectations saying that she would ask the one of the PM directors at my company to find someone whom I can shadow with to learn more about A/B testing.
Tushar Shanbhag:
- Tushar started the feedbacks by giving me what I did good: good structure in presenting my background and why I want to transition to PM (this is how I twisted my answer based on what Sara advised), calm and confident body language when answering his questions, being comfortable with the questions he asked.
- What I need to improve: prepare a better structure when I reply on product question by firstly clarifying the scenario with interviewers to make the right assumptions, then moving to deciding who the target user is, what the use case of product is, and finally coming with a viable solution.
- Transition: Tushar also advised that when someone wants to change to a new job, it can be any of the 3 types of changes: new company change, new role change (within the same company), or domain change (when you’re from B2C to B2B i.e). Therefore, it’d be best if we target at the jobs that require maximum 2 changes of the ones above, so we still have room to offer the recruiter.
I bet the pieces of advice that I got will be as helpful to someone else just as I learned from other candidates’ experience. I talked with Ruby after the session and we thought a list of feedbacks from all candidates can be a good resource for everyone! Thus, feel free to share with us your experience with LinkedIn event and what you’ve learned from the interviews.
