Summary
In 2019, I had to hire for a Senior PM which took ~150 days to go from req opened to offer signed. In 2020 we had to hire for another Senior PM in a very similar position on my Sharing team and we sped that up to 68 days. The second time around we ended up with such a strong pipeline, we redirected candidates to other roles at Dropbox. Here’s what I think helped.
Context difference
Before we start, let us acknowledge that 2019 and 2020 were very different years. The economy and really entire world changed. It was slightly easier to hire in 2020 due to the contraction in the overall economy giving companies a slight advantage over applicants. However, it wasn’t a total walk in the park. The tech sector was doing fairly well and many candidates had competing interviews. Several strong candidates dropped out due to getting offers from other companies prior to us being able to get them onsite. The person we eventually brought on board, unsurprisingly had multiple offers.
Additionally we instigated the Rooney rule across the organization. Meaning we had to have two diverse candidates finish onsites before being able to make an offer to a non-diverse candidate.
Before looking at resumes
I feel like this step often gets under-invested in, but it was where I spent a large amount of time and deliberation.
Set for success
Before looking at resumes we made sure the role and team was well set up. Luckily this was a backfill on a high performing team. So I wanted to emphasize that this role was part of a well staffed team as well as having clear projects, goals and path to success
I made sure to repeat these parts to both my recruiting team and candidates. At Dropbox each role is required to have doc with information like this, it is especially useful for getting interviewers up to speed on what you’re role is like and what you’re looking for.
Team staffing
Example Projects
Team OKRs / Goals
Definition of Success for this role
Leadership & Mentorship
My role came with an early career PM on the same workstream and I made mentorship a mandatory responsibility. This was especially effective because many PMs struggled to have consistent mentorship and time to practice leadership skills. This became part of the pitch for the role. Candidates would have leadership and mentorship responsibilities from day one.
Make a pitch before you talk to candidates
Senior Product Manager is a much sought after hire and trying to hire a great PM for a generic role is always going to be difficult. Spent time thinking about
The context of your role
What makes this role interesting
The impact a senior PM will have on the team and the org at large
How you will be supporting this role and how it fits in with the rest of your teams
What you will be doing to support this PM’s career
This will grow and evolve over time, but you need to be clear on why someone should want to apply to your role. I was hiring for a “core product” PM. So I positioned it differently than growth, zero to one new product and infra. You can divide PM into lots of different ways, this is what worked for me.
Example pitch
Hello! I hope your day is going well. I was going start off telling you about the role and the team and then dive into your background. How does that sound?
So I've been at Dropbox for about one and a half years. I lead Sharing at Dropbox. We're divided up into Sender, Receiver and Foundation/Platform. I'm looking for someone to lead our Receiver team, which helps make sure we complete the loop on sharing.
An example project that we're working on is a "Shared with me" page where people can find content that has been shared with them. Until recently, we hid this page even though it is front and center for many of our competitors like Google Drive, Box and Microsoft OneDrive. Part of the reason why we hid this page was that is kinda terrible and needs a lot more love to make it faster, more intuitive and all those things.
The team has a lead designer and an early career designer and we'd like to have a Senior PM paired with an early career PM. The team has a TL, EM and 7 full stack engineers. We have a user researcher, product analyst and UX writer shared between Sender and Receiver teams. You should be exceptionally well staff cross-functionally. This role is designed for a Senior PM to come in and really flex their skills across a wide spectrum from growth, experiments, optimizations to foundational changes to engine swapping onto a new platform to coordinating with teams with inbound asks to mentoring a PM on your team.
Empower sourcing & recruiting
I gave sourcing lots of detail on what I was looking for and what backgrounds might be suitable. This was 100% a two way conversation throughout the process. I got feedback that candidates were responding well to “Working on both small iterative experiments and large projects” so that got included in future posts and pitches to candidates.
Manager ReadMe
I’ve had a Manager Readme for a while and I had sourcing and recruiting include this on reach outs to potential candidates. I believe this helped our response rates and helped get candidates excited about the role (including responding more quickly with availability)
Diversity and Underrepresented Minorities
Because we had the Rooney rule in effect, it was possible that we would get to late stages with a candidate but be held back waiting for a diversity in our onsites. Our plan of attack was to fill our pipeline with underrepresented minorities from day 1. We tracked these metrics which helped make sure we were on track and make any adjustments as needed. Making sure we had a strong top of funnel (Sourcing) helped make our entire pipeline strong. Our sourcing team had a 68% response rate compared to a baseline of 30%-40% at Dropbox. And a conversion (to Hiring Manager Screen) rate of 29% compared to a baseline of 10%-15%. Having a clear pitch (and things like a Manager Readme) helped us out-perform. Credit for this data goes entirely to my recruiter for being very organized and data driven enough to manually calculate this numbers
Example Sourcing Metrics:
56 candidate reach outs to date (+10 WoW)
68% response rate (+8% WoW)
Baseline is 30%-40%
29% conversion rate (+7% WoW)
Baseline is 10%-15%
Example Diversity Metrics:
41% of total pipeline is diverse to date (+9% WoW)
32% of pipeline is gender diverse to date (-2% WoW)
8% of pipeline is URM diverse to date (-2% WoW)
64% of sourcing outreach is diverse to date (+7% WoW)
44% of sourcing outreach is gender diverse to date (-2% WoW)
19% of sourcing outreach is URM diverse to date (+11% WoW)
Watchpoints:
Excellent response rate and conversion rate for sourced candidates
Recruiting to optimize toward 40-60% response rate
Recruiting to optimize toward 20-30% conversion rate
Overall, 60% of mid-stage candidates are diverse. For us mid-stage is passing “Product Intuition” and just before on-site interviews.
Get active online
I ended up engaging more with the PM community online and posting my job in various forums. The two biggest drivers were LinkedIn and Slack groups.
LinkedIn
A few tips posting on LInkedIn
Upped my LinkedIn activity in general to get the algorithm to boost more of my posts
Be mindful of how your snippet will show up in the activity feed. LinkedIn posts get a “… see more” which needs to be unfurled. You have about two lines to grab attention above the fold
It’s ok to repost a little. I justified it to myself by updating my pitch and finding new gifs. Who doesn’t love new gifs?
Ask for shares & reposts
Checked in with the #product channel in Dropbox’s companywide Slack and asked to spread the word!
Posted on Product Groups
No success with LinkedIn groups, but Slack communities were super helpful. Notably Lenny’s Newsletter has a growing community that I’ve enjoyed being active in.
Have a personality
I try to convey who I am with some of the language I use and emojis and GIFs.
Example language: “We need someone that is excited to do optimizations, quick experiments, multi-quarter projects and engine swap a new API/Platform. In the past we’ve seen PMs who like to do some of these things, but not excited the other half. And that leads to attrition. You can’t be half-sad at work.
Interviewing
Pitch right away
I pitch everyone the job as if I want them to join the team and they already have extremely attractive offers elsewhere. I start off my Hiring Manager screen with the pitch. I try to make sure candidates have an excellent understanding of my role and why it is interesting. I use the questions that candidates ask me or my recruiting team to refine the pitch.
I don’t save pitching for the end, I assume that if we put you into the interview loop we are excited about your candidacy.
Ask candidates what they want
Zooming out from the role, I also spend a fair bit of time asking what candidates are looking for in a manager and a company. I try to ask follow up questions and give examples from my experience to double check that I understand what they’re looking for.
I also like to get a sense of where they are coming from. Dropbox is a fairly large company, but not quite as large as Facebook or Google. I go over Dropbox highlights, but I also like to call out specific areas that are more challenging. I want candidates coming in eyes wide open and on occasion the challenges we have at Dropbox are ones that candidates are excited to tackle, even if they don’t excite me personally.
Help your fellow interviewers
Dropbox has a great culture around this, so I don’t take credit. But documenting basically what is covered above is super helpful and makes sure your fellow interviewers are in sync on the role you have open.
Writing it all down beforehand also helps make sure you’re being consistent in your evaluations.
This was super helpful for me to read and get a better idea of how the picture might look on the other side. As an accidental PM trying to figure out what the next best step for me is, just reading your pitch about how the team is going to enable someone who joins as a senior PM felt stress relieving.