What I learned as product leader from my interim job as head of recruiting

What makes a good product manager? An insatiable hunger to create a customer journey full of Wow-Moments.

Recently I´ve got the great opportunity to work as interim Head of Recruiting. The reason was simple. In the company I worked for it wasn´t about titles, but about skills. In order to move towards a product led company one of the goals was to hire more people with product skills and product thinking. Thats why I was assigned to take over this role. It was a great learning journey and I would love to share some of my learnings with you.

As an absolute beginner in recruiting with no knowledge at all, but a toolbox ful of methods from 12 years in product I did what I can do best. Putting on the shoes of the customer, in this case the future candidate. We used one of my all time favorite tools — the customer journey — and turned it into a recruiting journey map.

Initially we just wanted to understand the entire process so we can streamline it across the company. We wanted to help everybody to easily understand how to get people on board faster. But it turned out, that there is a huge potential to add additional goals like improving the “time to contract signed”and the future employees satisfaction.

The results

• We learned that we have plenty of opportunities to automize steps in the entire journey, so we can speed up the time to recruit.
• We identified the time wasters in the process. I am sure they equaled the downlights from an applicant point of view.
• We figured out that the recruiter took too much responsibilities away from the teams and became a bottleneck. Unecessary.
• By adding a few automails, templates and structures we saw huge potential to improve the experience with low effort.
• We uncovered a couple of recurring tasks, like introducing managers manually to the recruiting tools. Putting this into a manual or short video could take away a lot of work from the recruiter.
• By documenting the process we were able to share it across the org, gather feedback and improve the process further.

How it evolved

As a product leader, hiring is one of my main and ongoing tasks.

It was always important to me to get the employee journey right. But I was not aware, that the journey begins as soon as budget for a new hire is signed off and recruiting starts. I learned, that its my responsibility as a product leader to create a seamless journey even for not yet hired talent.

I learned a lot during that journes and was impressed how well my productmanagement knowledge can be combined with the knowledge of recruiting.

Here is my top 3 learnings from back than.

1. Which skills do you require?

Think about the skills you require for the team, the product and to shape the future of your product as well. Latest after 12 month in the job, you will be asked for a promotion from your not so new employee (all PMs I know are quite ambitious). Think early about which skills you require from your team, what makes a Junior, Senior, Lead PM or what it takes to grow into a leadership position. If you have that ready you can use it for the job posting, the interview, the development talks, salary raises, promotions….

If your requirements are well defined you will be able to shape the Employee Journey for your PMs from Recruiting to Onboarding to Promotion to Offboarding.

2. How can you help your stakeholders to support you best, when hiring and assessing talent?

For the recruiting process it makes a huge difference to create a clear guidance for the interviews.

• Who is going to interview, which areas shall people explore and which questions do you want people to ask?
• How long is the interviewprocess? Great PMs are rare and if you are not fast, someone else will be faster. So be clear about how long it will take from first invite to sign the contract and how many stages you will need in between to find the perfect interview.
• Similar to product, recruiting is about storytelling. Make sure you and the other interviewers have the same understanding of what you want the applicant to get as key takeaway.

For the rest of the journey, a clearly outlined idea of what you expect from your PMs helps you and your stakeholder to give better (360) feedback. It also helps to give your PMs a better understanding of areas for growth and development and things needed to get a promotion.

3. Be as consistent as possible

If you are very clear what you require from your future PM, it will help you to be more transparent about your expectations. Building a common understanding of what makes a good PM across the org is a great asset for everyone. It will not only help you to treat your PMs more equal, but it also helps everybody to speak a common language.

I fully understand, that no PMs equals another and that you will never reach a state, where you can assess somebody completely fair and transparent. Bias, individual contributions, relationships, circumstances… there are a lot of hurdles on the road. But its a good fundament to build upon and I highly recommend to zoom out of your daily business and treat your PMs employee journey as if its a customer journey.

Interested to learn more? I am happy to share my templates and knowledge around the PM employee journey. Get access to a detailled summary about competencies, required competencies depending on levels, a well defined onboarding plan (also based on the same competencies… consistency, I`ve talked about it in the article) and more: MORE INFORMATION HERE