Why We Don’t Interview Product Managers Anymore

Job interviews are mostly nonsense. According to Ron Friedman, a psychologist and author of “The Best places to work”, 80% of people lie during their interviews — so if that's the case, the information you’re hearing is likely fiction, or at best, inspired by real-world events. On top of that, there are now huge volumes of research from academic circles, as well as popular journals like Harvard Business Review, INC.com, and Forbes — all pointing to a simple fact. Job interviews mean you hire the best actor on the day — not the best candidate.

So we don’t do them.

Instead, we audition product managers (and Designers too for that matter) in the same way actors are auditioned for a movie. In our specially designed auditions, product managers perform real-world exercises to assess how they think about problems in an environment where nobody from the company knows anything about their experience, their background, or their formal education.

This allows us to strip out as much bias from the room by modifying our entire recruitment approach — and so far it's had good results, especially when it comes to hiring more diverse candidates. Right now, roughly 70% of the team in our division are women, in an industry in which the numbers are essentially inverted.

Given I have stolen bits of this process from various organizations and added my own little parts along the way, I figured I’d share it in case you find it useful. The people who have been through it, however painful, have given me positive feedback, so I share this with the world in the hope it helps others trying to hire great people.

So, without further ado, this is how we are hiring the world's best product team.

The three phases of interviewing for Product Management Roles

There are three stages to interviewing for a product management role at Whispir, but the one I’ll cover in-depth here is stage 2 — the audition. The rest are self-explanatory but I’ve abbreviated them below just in case.

Stage 1. The Phone screening

We do a 30-minute phone or zoom screening which is just to work out things like organizational alignment (do they really want to work on what we’re doing), salary expectations, working rights, and just general housekeeping. We also explain the interview format, why we use it, what they…