5 Reasons Product Hires Fail
Have you hired a Product Manager recently? Or maybe you're just about to start?
The painful truth is that more than 50% of Product Manager hires don't go to plan, with many PM's leaving a new role within 11 months.
Thats expensive (in terms of time and cost), frustrating, and demoralising for all involved.
So why does this happen?
There is a huge diversity in the understanding of what the role actually involves. Most of the time when hiring, no effort is put in to ensuring everyone on the hiring side has a common understanding of the job. Cut and paste job descriptions don't help because the hiring team doesn't read them properly, and a candidates confirmation bias / eagerness to land a job means they gloss over any discrepancies.
Because most smaller companies don't hire product managers (at any level) often, they don't have a good candidate attraction system in place. Usually they'll just throw up an advert on LinkedIn, which will generate 100+ applications, 95 of which will be unsuitable. The right candidate for your company is probably not actively looking for a job right now.
Interview processes don't screen properly for the specific skills and experiences that a company requires. Because nobody really nailed down the particulars of the role at the start, it's impossible to screen accurately for what good looks like. Generally companies rely on the same process and questions that they use for all their other hiring, or they steal questions from the millions of "best questions to ask in a Product Manager interview" articles floating around online. So now we have a delta between employer and candidate understanding of the role, and a flawed process for identifying a 'good' candidate. Hiring becomes opinion based 🤦♀️
No proper onboarding process
Once the hire is made and the new PM starts, there's often no proper onboarding process. Onboarding is critical for PM's particularly because of the wide ranging nature of the role. There is strong evidence that good onboarding leads to far better performance and retention beyond 12 months.
However, most PM's are just dropped into a team to sink or swim.A lack of autonomy, progression and learning opportunities
Ok, this one is entirely about retention, but a good candidate should be asking about these things at the interview stage. Time and again product managers list autonomy, learning and progression as critical for them to stay in role. If you hire a PM and then treat them like a project manager, they'll move on very quickly.
All of these issues are easily preventable. Get in touch to learn how!
