It is an understatement to say that good Product Managers are in very high demand. Thanks to the amazing growth of startups and corresponding funding. Every day, either a friend who is a product leader or a startup founder ask me if I have references for a good PM. I am mostly helpless.
In this low supply + high demand context, posting a job ad on LinkedIn or hunting for profiles in naukri.com is not going to be enough. Here are some of the channels that worked for me and people I know –
- Alumni Networks – Posting in alumni network of B-schools, engineering colleges
- Referral – Nothing like it
- Product communities – The Product Folks, Product Tank, Creators of Products, Product School etc. They either have slack or telegram groups for community members
- Product whatsapp groups – There are a lot of informal citywise whatsapp groups where PMs learn from each other and jobs are shared there
- Startup news portals like yourstory, hellomeets
- Forums like Product Hunt, Reddit, Linkedin/FB PM groups. Yes, I hired a PM who reached out reading our Reddit post 🙂
Interesting things that can be tried –
- Have a list of target companies from where you would like to find candidates and ping them on Linkedin. Your own version of headhunting 🙂
- Use your founder’s Linkedin account and ping the target candidates. Response rates are higher.
- Multiple posts on Linkedin about the openings on the same day. In one of my previous firms, some 6 of us made hiring posts on the same day, kept liking others’ posts, and got around 60 resumes of which 20 odd were relevant. It was a big win when comparing with 2 or 3 relevant resumes that we get in a week otherwise.
- Brand building – You share your learnings on social media which can attract the right candidates. Few folks have mentioned that they hired their entire team through Twitter.
- Your company website can host product blogs and if quality content is served, it can attract the right audience
- Some firms put hoardings near IT zones, play ads on radio and even theaters. I don’t know the efficacy of these though.
What other interesting hacks have worked for you?
Credits: Suhas Motwani, Founder ‘The Product Folks’ & Srivatsan, PM PayPal for their contribution to this post.
