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…