Advice from a Product Recruiter Navigating the Current Job Market
Alex Piercy
Background
My name is Alex and I work as a Senior Product Recruiter at Gravitas.
I've got a pool of candidates I work with quite regularly and I'm constantly in touch with them, whether they’re not looking, passively looking or actively looking.
Typically, I have met all of them at some point during a qualification call, where I try to understand what their motivations are, what they've worked on, what they're looking to achieve for the next role, and what their strategy is to go about finding that next role.
Once we’ve got an idea of what they want on a 1-2 year time horizon, we can assess how we can best help them. Where there are opportunities that align we let them know about it, if they’re interested we pitch them to clients, schedule them for an interview and occasionally will be responsible for asking some screening questions beforehand.
The amount of opportunities we share depends on whether the candidate is actively or passively looking - if they’re only passively looking but we find an opportunity that perfectly matches their criteria, we’ll try to make an introduction. If they’re not really looking at all, but we know what their career objectives are, we’ll help them grow their network in pursuit of that (ie. if they want to move into leadership roles, we’ll connect them with really strong product leaders). We see our role as more than just matching job opportunities, we’re looking to build as much community as possible, both 1-to-1 but also through networking or sponsor events.
If you’re looking to work with a recruiter, I suggest speaking to PMs in your network and ask them which great recruiters they trust. Alternatively, you can just ask me!
What is the market like at the moment?
It's been a tough two years. Off the back of COVID, there was mass hiring for all tech. We had a lot of companies that had either seen some good growth from COVID or had got some solid investment from VCs and were pursuing high growth strategies. Headcount shot up, there was a lot of hiring and salaries were getting bumped up as well.
Then came the big tech redundancies around December 2020, which triggered a round of redundancies in start-ups and scale-ups. The same companies that were mass hiring realised that growth wasn’t where they had predicted it to be, there was a cost of living crisis, an energy crisis, and they had to reduce overheads. So last year, was relatively slow in comparison.
But by October/November, we saw some really strong growth and that’s led into January of this year. We’re about 4-5% up on the job flow. It’s still a pretty competitive job market though, as at the turn of the New Year lots of the passively looking candidates are upping their search, and so companies get a lot of pick in the market as there are lots of great candidates who avoided a move last year because the market was really terrible.
What can job searchers expect in this period of reheating?
You can look at the post-COVID boom as an example. Once companies started to see significant growth, there was a huge appetite to hire, and so lots of PMs were moving to better roles. Salary offers were going through the roof and so were the counter-offers as companies wanted to keep hold of their product people to avoid the expenses of rehiring.
We’re not there yet, but VCs are starting to see some good growth and they've got cash that they need to invest and they want to invest, and so if the growth continues with their current low overheads that’ll bring confidence back to the market. They’re predicting that at the back end of the summer, things will really start to pick up with investments.
If you’re actively looking, it’s important to know that any company hiring now is filling a business-critical role so they’ll be expecting you to come in and have an impact immediately - you’re not going to be coasting, so make sure that you’re framing everything on impact and the value that you would add.
If you’re passively looking, I would think less about when’s a good time to move in the market and instead focus on what you’re hoping to achieve from the move. Make your checklist and then target companies that fit it. I would assume that the financial stability of a company is going to be quite high up on your list, and so again, look at the companies hiring now - they will be the ones that are more likely to be stable.
Advice for finding job opportunities early in your PM career
Generally, I work actively with candidates who have more than a year’s commercial experience in Product. Recruiters aren’t cheap and so for more junior or entry-level roles companies typically rely on their brand and will source those roles directly as opposed to outsourcing to an agency.
The biggest thing I'd recommend is networking, both internally at your company as well as externally. It's so hard to get that initial opportunity in Product and so being introduced or having an existing relationship to support your efforts will make your life much easier.
For example, I worked with a really strong CPO and she said the way that she hires her entry-level product people, is she’ll go to her engineers and she'll ask, ‘who do you know within the client fulfillment or the customer service team who you engage with on a regular basis’, write down those names and speak to them about Product. 9 times out of 10, those candidates will have the right mentality of a product manager because they're speaking to users every day, they've had the initiative to understand there's a common theme or problem, and then they’ve communicated that to the engineers or someone else who can action it.
If you’re looking externally for a role, many people I know get their roles through recommendations form people. I’m generalising, but Product people typically are very, very social people who love introducing people to one another. If you get in the right circles with the right PMs, they will open up so many more doors to you than you applying to a role that’s got 400 other applicants and the post has been open for 48 hours. Just make sure you stay in contact with the people that you meet, and when opportunities arise drop them a message.
Advice for standing out in the current job market
Finally, when thinking about your CV and interviewing, particularly if you’re looking for an entry-level role, you really want to highlight your transferable skills, as Product is a very transferable role. You can easily transition from FinTech to a sports tech product - the fundamental skills and processes are the same. Show adaptability and focus on impact through stats and metrics. Talk about the impact on engagement, monthly active user (MAU) growth - all the core business metrics that drive growth. It shows that you’ve got an eye on the data, that you’re numbers driven and that you see your role as adding value and can isolate your individual inputs for that.
Also, think critically about what each specific company to which you’re applying would likely need. If we take B2B vs B2C as an example. In B2B, you generally end up having fewer end users that make up a larger percentage of your revenue and so the way you interact with them is different. You can afford to be much closer to those customers, gathering significant qualitative data to serve them better.
If you’re applying to B2C, they’ll typically have many more end users that make up a much smaller portion of your revenue, so you might need to be competent in addressing a larger dataset to draw insights. The importance of each individual customer is different, and being able to demonstrate your understanding of that particular perspective will help hirers have confidence in your ability to add value.
Finding companies with a good Product culture
Isolating which companies have a good Product culture is naturally difficult from the outside, but it’s not impossible. First things first, you can’t make assumptions based on the industry or the size of the company. Tesco, for instance, has a very, very good Product culture. Due to its size, you’d expect it to be very delivery-focused, but they developed this amazing grad scheme (which they’ve stopped now), where you’d go on a rotation to 4 different within tech then move into Product, and those people that I placed there are some of the best PMs I’ve ever worked with.
So to start with, it’s always good to look at how Product is structured within the company. If the Product hierarchy mirrors the tech hierarchy then you can get a base understanding of how highly they value Product skills and processes. This is most important at the leadership level, and so you want to see both a CTO AND a CPO because it’s evidence that they value Product within their C-suite. The signal gets stronger if that trickles down with mirrored Engineering and Product leads, and Heads of Engineering and Product. This mirroring of functions is a great indication that Product and Tech are very well aligned, which normally means that Product has a decent seat at the decision-making table.
Getting a little closer to the day-to-day functioning of Product at a company, you can get a much stronger signal of the quality of a Product culture by speaking to a PM there. You want to understand if an individual PM is just delivering on someone else’s roadmap or instead, they’re actually thinking about the problem, finding a solution and iterating on that solution independently. If individual PMs are being given the opportunity to have a say around what the strategy looks like for their Product, then they’re being properly empowered, which is where you want to be as a PM. You can tell this by the way they answer your questions as empowered PMs will discuss their methodologies and the process by which they arrived at their solutions and not just state deliverables.
These are some key telltale signs, but there’s a degree to which you will develop an intuitive sense over time that surpasses these strict rules. Product means lots of different things to different companies, and even titles can come with a wide range of different responsibilities, and so your best bet is to become as familiar as possible with how Product works across different organisations by speaking to the people working in them.
