In startups and technology firms, product managers are essential. They are in charge of your platform or product line’s strategy, roadmap, and feature definition.
They are also in charge of the cross-functional groups tasked with enhancing your product. How do you go about making that exceptional hire for such a crucial position?
Don’t follow your gut instinct. Although going with your instinct may have helped you in the past, you shouldn’t use it as a hiring tool. This is why:
Your instinct isn’t a reliable indicator to hire product managers in UAE. While research indicates that these aren’t the best predictors of future job success, resumes and work experience are frequently utilized to influence recruiting decisions. Hunch also falls short. Conversation management is a skill that good product managers excel at.
You might be perfectly at ease and think that this candidate would be a wonderful fit for your product team during the interview process. But do they approach their thinking strategically? Do they have effective planning, organizing, and prioritizing skills? Gut instinct alone is insufficient to predict these qualities.
A poor hire costs money. Approximately 33% of an employee’s income might be lost due to turnover, according to Employee Benefit News. Product managers are highly compensated experts. Making a poor hire has a high cost.
Your team will be overworked until a new product manager joins, which will add to the expense of hiring, training, and finding a new product manager.
How then can you find high-performing product managers to hire? Here are four ideas to get you going:
1. Describe the abilities needed to hire product managers in UAE.
Hard and soft talents must coexist in equal measure for product managers. Product managers need to manage stakeholder relationships, influence decision-making, lead product development, and innovate in addition to having a basic understanding of business principles, the ability to prioritize tasks, and the capacity to conduct and analyze research.
Additionally, you should look for a product manager that is adept at navigating your industry and market. You may have additional requirements for a product manager, depending on the complexity of your offering or market.
For instance, if you’re developing creative items, you’ll need a flexible thinker who can see the larger picture. You need someone with a strong desire to adhere to structure and norms if you’re producing products that must adhere to industry regulations.
2. Determine the essential behavioral qualities you require.
Finding the correct behavioral fit is essential when approaching hiring from a talent optimization perspective. Include the important behavioral qualities needed to perform the job well in addition to your resume.
Typically, product managers are
- Collaborative
- Organized
- Empathetic
- Influential
- Creative problem solvers
- Adaptable
At Kodehash, We advise hiring managers to develop a Job Target using a brief assessment survey. Job Targets identify the behavioral motivations and mental skills a candidate needs to be successful in a position.
In this way, prior to posting the job ad, all stakeholders are in agreement regarding the kind of candidate they are seeking. Hire the best candidate with the right skills at the right time.
3. Implement the best hiring practices to seek the best candidates
In general, better hires result from making sure an applicant has a cognitive and behavioral fit for a position. But it’s crucial to consider culture fit, especially when hiring a product manager. This person will collaborate with workers from several departments inside your company.
They must suit the corporate culture in order to promote it in their day-to-day activities. Include science in your hiring process to ensure behavioral and cognitive fit.
The candidates’ innate behavioral drives are identified via our PI Behavioral Assessment. We choose one of the 17 Reference Profiles when someone completes the examination. These demonstrate the motivations behind that person’s actions at work and aid in determining job fit.
Our PI Cognitive Assessment gauges an individual’s capacity to pick up new skills. Someone will likely struggle to succeed if their cognitive score is outside the parameters you set in your job target.
4. Address and remove hiring biases.
Unconscious prejudice is a problem that can affect even the best hiring supervisors. These biases frequently prohibit you from choosing the objectively best applicant for the position, whether it’s choosing a candidate because they “like you” or passing over another candidate because of something fleeting (like a tattoo or piercing).
The ideal product manager can be behaviorally the complete opposite of you. They can have blue hair color or come from a different background than you. It only matters if they are a good fit for the position at hand and the culture of your business.
So, how can you overcome bias? By integrating objective science into your hiring procedure, you can lessen subjective prejudice. This involves utilizing instruments like behavioral evaluations to guide the content of your interview questions or cognitive assessments to forecast success in the workplace.
You may also take into account additional information, such as a candidate’s technical training and years of relevant experience.
Examples of interview questions to ask a prospective product manager
Here are some interview questions for product managers that will help you find your next fantastic hire:
- Share a time when you had to put a product vision into action. Together with whom did you work, and why?
- Have you ever had trouble adding a new feature? What were the difficulties and lessons?
- Can you describe an instance when a product decision caused friction in your life? What decision was made?
- What characteristics of a successful product, in your own words? is a productive product launch?
For the product manager position in our software, more than 1,700 employees have set Job Targets. They usually end up on one of these three Reference Profiles.
The three most typical reference profiles for product managers
1. Captain
Captains are excellent at taking leadership, just like their name suggests. They are self-assured leaders that enjoy innovating, solving problems, and learning new things.
They freely delegate both authority and details because they are naturally people-oriented. They therefore naturally fit the description of a product manager.
2. Venturer
Venturers are straightforward, factual, and honest. They also take calculated risks and are self-starters with goals. They’re excellent candidates for a product management position because they’re change-makers and challengers of the status quo.
3. Maverick
Mavericks think creatively and unconventionally. They are fast to act and have positive reactions to pressure and challenges, which are essential traits for a product management position.
Mavericks make excellent product managers because they are relationship-based relationship builders who seek input from many stakeholders throughout the process.
How to Hire Product Managers in UAE
A few pointers for luring Captains, Venturers, and Mavericks to your open position are as follows:
1.Use the right channels.
Mavericks and captains both enjoy social interactions. While Venturers may not be as sociable by nature, they are effective networkers thanks to their high levels of dominance and visionary traits.
These candidates are probably attending networking events, establishing connections on LinkedIn, or mixing with their acquaintances to find their next job.
Ask your current staff to participate in recruiting events and use their networks to reach as many potential candidates as possible when sourcing candidates with these Reference Profiles.
2.Create effective job postings.
Use language that speaks to your ideal candidate while writing a job posting. These three Reference Profiles enjoy challenges, taking charge of others, and finding solutions to issues. They are all in favour of wording that highlights the demanding nature or complexity of the position.
3.Make a compelling job pitch.
The purpose of an interview is to determine whether a candidate is a good fit for the position and whether joining your company is the best course of action for them. Mavericks, Venturers, and Captains all enjoy a good challenge and a good victory.
Make your company seem like a place they would want to work by selling them on your company’s vision during the interview.
Focus on how they will have the chance to lead projects, influence others, and move quickly when pitching the position. These are the primary behavioural needs that these job candidates hope to have met.
How Top-performing product managers can be hired by businesses using the Predictive Index.
You may recruit with confidence thanks to PI Hire’s features. Powered by behavioural data, PI condenses more than 65 years of science into a user-friendly software package. Build a Job Target that evaluates how well candidates fit the role and use PI to align stakeholders on your ideal job description.
Once you have a list of potential candidates, PI assists you with every step of the hiring process, including interviews.
Say, for instance, that you’re trying to find an excellent product manager but aren’t sure where to begin. Investigating PI Hire would teach you that successful product managers frequently have similar behavioural traits, such as innovative thinking, a willingness to “break the rules,” and a propensity for taking risks and problem-solving.
The software would then direct you through the process of writing a job description and its corresponding Job Target as well as the following steps for interviewing prospective employees.
Let’s skip ahead to the hiring procedure. There are a number of suitable applicants on your list who fit your behavioural and cognitive criteria. With the help of interview questions created by PI, you can delve even further into a candidate’s behavioural strengths and weaknesses.
For example, you could ask the following question to a candidate whose formality drive is just a little bit outside the Job Target:
Tell me about a moment when you had to violate the law to create a product. What happened as a result?
You increase your chances of finding the right fit for your company—and making your next outstanding hire—by customising the interview process for each of your candidates.
You shouldn’t rely on speculation when hiring.
To find out the most typical Reference Profiles for any position in your company, use our free Job Benchmarking Calculator.
FAQ to hire Product Managers in UAE
How come I need to hire product managers in UAE?
- Hire a product manager who can develop, oversee, and refine a product strategy.
- Boost communication between the engineering, marketing, and product teams.
- Create, release, and test new features for your product.
- Enhance the integration of the product API with other software tools.
What are the different job descriptions for product managers?
The role of a product manager is well-established. Even if it’s uncommon to see a company advertise a position with a different name, you can determine that an alternative job title better fits the job description.