Covey’s how-to-hire series offers unique insights from people ops professionals on the front lines of tackling the challenges of talent sourcing today.

Tech layoffs jumped 417% from November 2021 to November 2022, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas, Inc. With so many cuts, there’s an overwhelming number of candidates for startups with open roles. 

A full candidate pool might seem like a blessing. But the reality is a large pool of candidates doesn’t mean they’re all qualified. You might be vetting thousands of applicants a week to fill a single role. That’s a lot of work—especially if you’re the only person at your startup handling hiring. 

Today, we hear from the Recruiting Manager at revolutionary startup Kubecost, Stephanie Finck, on how she navigated the current talent sourcing landscape while looking to hire a product manager (PM). Kubecost is a cost optimization tool that helps teams using Kubernetes to monitor and reduce their cloud spend.

When I joined Kubecost about a year ago, my greatest challenge—like many other startups—was weeding through the flood of candidates. 

As the sole recruiter for Kubecost, bandwidth was my biggest struggle. In 2022 we averaged about 1,000 applicants a month across nearly a dozen open roles at any given time—which made it difficult for me to review each resume, let alone meet with every candidate.

The sheer volume of applicants was especially challenging when hiring for our first Product Manager. The role is technical and nuanced, and the new hire needed to align closely with the organization’s vision, earn the trust of our founding technical leadership team, and be passionate about our product space.

We were lucky to have strong Product Management foundations when we started the company in 2019—our co-founder and CEO, Webb Brown, brought a wealth of knowledge from his previous product management roles at companies like Google. But as our product and company scaled, we needed a dedicated Product Manager to partner with Webb, Engineering, and our customers in building and executing on our product roadmap.

To make the PM hiring process manageable, we first had to figure out what we needed in this role, and build an ideal candidate profile. From there, we created a strong interview process to identify qualified candidates from the talent pool and move them efficiently through the hiring journey. Here are some best practices for you to follow when you do this:

1. Identify What Your Company Needs in a Product Manager

Start by identifying what is important in a product manager specific to your organization. Think through the type of products you are building and the tools you use to build them. Then ask yourself what differentiates a product manager who can do that work and use those tools. Bucket your unique criteria into tangible and intangible categories, so you can quickly identify the specific type of qualified candidate you need.

Tangible Criteria for a Product Manager Role

Defining tangible criteria for your role will help you eliminate talent that doesn't have the baseline skillset for your company's needs. To identify this criteria for your organization’s PM role, ask yourself these questions:

1. What tools does your organization use, and does the candidate need to have experience with them?
   At Kubecost, we knew we would need a product manager who had experience as a first PM hire with a tech startup like Kubecost with a passion for open-source.
   
   

2. What go-to-market experience does the new hire need based on your company's development stage?

As a startup, we needed someone who had experience taking a product to market for the first time so they could understand the problems we needed to solve.

3. Does the person in this role need to be in a certain area?

Companies with on-site or hybrid work environments may need their PM to work in a certain area. If so, be clear about this requirement from the start to respect the candidate’s time. You don't want to find the perfect candidate only to find they can't accommodate your organization's setup. We knew that our team needed a US-based product manager.

4. What PM skills are necessary based on your company’s product and the strengths and weaknesses of your existing team?

Our product manager would be working on data-heavy, highly technical products, so we needed someone with a strong foundation in both product management and data science. We needed someone who could transform Kubernetes data into actionable insights about how people use and monitor their cloud spend.

Each organization has different needs, though; maybe you already have a strong data scientist on your product team but don’t have anyone with strong go-to-market strategy skills. Whatever that gap may be, build your candidate requirements around filling those gaps.

5. How many years of experience does the PM new hire need?
   We identified 3-9 years of experience as the minimum amount of experience-based knowledge needed in this role to bring substantial value to the team. We also needed them to have work experience in one of the following contexts to take our product forward:

• Held a technical product manager role 

• OR had a background in engineering 

• OR enterprise software experience

• OR held a product manager role at a FAANG (Meta [formerly Facebook], Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Alphabet [Google]) company

Intangible Criteria for a Product Manager Role

A product manager has to be a strong cultural fit as much as a technical fit since they drive the day-to-day operations of where your company is heading. More than most positions, the PM needs to be closely aligned with your values and vision. 

To identify what intangible qualities your organization is seeking, ask your hiring team these questions:

1. What problems should the new hire be excited to solve?
   At Kubecost, we knew we’d need someone excited to solve problems in cloud infrastructure and monitoring. If a candidate didn’t understand the pain points our customers face, they would struggle to build a solution that would solve it.

   
   

2. What values should the candidate exemplify?

Every organization has a different vibe; if a candidate doesn't value what your organization values, the struggle will inevitably appear in your final product. For example, at Kubecost we are a small and tight-knit team with a strict "no-jerks" policy (highly recommended 🌞), so if a candidate was rude in an interview, we quickly ruled them out for the role.

3. Is the PM candidate flexible or rigid in how they think about products and work with a team?

As a startup where employees wear a lot of different hats, you have to iterate quickly—shifting priorities at a moment's notice and being creative to find new solutions. A hard-lined, by-the-books PM might find it difficult to adapt and collaborate in this environment. 

When you’re just not sure what you want or need

If you’re hiring your org’s first product manager role, you may still be figuring out what you want in the position. That's okay. You need to identify the job's basic requirements before opening the role, but you can also use the interviewing process to clarify your expectations even more.

When Kubecost was starting our search for a product manager, we talked to candidates across the board. Some had  PhDs and MBAs, and others had undergrad degrees. Some came from an engineering background, and others didn't. We were open to a variety of experiences.

But as we went through the hiring process, we found that we gravitated towards those with a data science background. And as we delved deeper into why that was, we realized the PM needed a strong understanding of data transformation and visualization to build our products.

So, don't worry if you have to test the waters to find your direction. Pay attention to what talent you’re drawn to, and examine why to make sure you’re focusing on skills. The last thing you want is to pick your first PM based on unconscious biases.

2. Write Transparent Job Descriptions

Once you’ve identified what your organization needs in a PM, it’s time to send out the bat signal for your ideal candidate (a.k.a. post a job listing). 

Startups often create ambiguous job descriptions because team members typically play a lot of roles as their organization is evolving. Don’t fall for this trap—be transparent. 

A good job description gives prospective hires enough information to self-select out of the application process if their skills aren’t a  fit. Clearly communicating what your organization needs is also the first step in finding those one-of-a-kind candidates who fit the PM role like a glove.  

Your job description should include the following:

• Who your organization is - Give the prospect an idea of how your company started and what your mission is
  
  

• What your organization does - Describe the company's vision and how the role will contribute to the company's future
  
  

• The problems you want the PM to solve -  This should not be just a list of technical qualifications. Describe specific outcomes you want to obtain by adding this role
  
  

• Tasks - List the primary responsibilities of this position in your organization (product manager roles vary greatly depending on the organization!)
  
  

• Clearly defined “must-have” and “nice-to-have” skills and experience - By categorizing requirements in this way, you provide full context for the role while not causing qualified candidates to self-select out of the process. Depending on the flexibility of the role and your organization, you might even include a statement that welcomes applicants to apply even if they don’t fit all of the requirements listed.
  
  

• Salary range - This is legally required in many states and increasingly expected in all states. Use a tool like Payscale to find a fair compensation scale for your specific requirements.
  
  

• DEI statement - Let candidates know that your organization is committed to equity in the workplace and welcomes candidates from all backgrounds to apply. Describe how you demonstrate your commitment to diversity in your workplace.

For example, here’s the statement we include in Kubecost’s job descriptions:

We celebrate and embrace our differences! Aside from being an Equal Opportunity Employer, we place a high value on inviting new perspectives & a broad range of backgrounds and experiences; we are inclusive and seek to create a psychologically safe environment for all teammates; we disagree respectfully.

3. Define your interview process

For your interview process to be fair, it needs to be consistent across candidates—which is difficult when there is no defined process. 

At Kubecost, we initially didn’t think through the structure of our PM interviews—and it hurt our hiring process. A case in point was the final presentation interview, where candidates explained their vision for our product. 

We initially assigned this project at the end of our interview process. But as we were hiring for the role, we realized that this presentation should happen sooner since it’s a powerful way to gauge a candidate’s product skills. We moved that assignment up in the process so we were clear early on whether a candidate was a good fit. 

This small change helped us gauge the candidate's product skills sooner and helped the candidate understand the problems they would be solving. The step weeded out those who weren’t interested in these problems. For those who were interested, the presentation got them excited about the opportunity.

So, before you even post the job opening, define the step-by-step interview process that every candidate will go through. Our interview process for our product manager role went something like this:

1. Initial interview with the recruiter

2. A second interview with the hiring manager

3. Send the candidate a project

4. Review the project with our internal team (including the CEO to make sure vision and values are aligned)

5. A third interview where the candidate would present the project, and our internal team could ask questions

6. Follow-up interviews with the individuals they would work with if they joined our team

7. Review internally 

8. Make a job offer or communicate if we were going in a different direction

After you’ve outlined your interview process, thoughtfully formulate value-based interview questions that will communicate what matters to your organization and help you identify if the candidate shares those values.

Use Covey to Find the Most Qualified Candidates

Historically, it was challenging (and sometimes downright impossible) to find enough time as a single-person department to source, vet, and interview the thousands of applicants I see in a week. And, unfortunately, if you don’t move fast enough, you can lose some of the best candidates. 

You need a strong vetting process that allows you to move quickly while still being thorough. That’s where Covey comes in.

Covey’s augmented sourcing tool has saved me so much time by sourcing and vetting candidates and automating the repeatable messages in the hiring process. All I had to do was tell them all the nitty-gritty details of what I wanted in a candidate - down to the type of companies a candidate has worked for and how much Kubernetes experience they have. 

All of those details Covey packages into a custom code that runs thousands of profiles against my checklist. If it’s a match, then Covey automatically sends an outreach sequence to them. I don’t even have to lift a finger to get a full pipeline of candidates for highly technical roles! Now, I can focus on getting roles filled with the best candidates without spending countless hours vetting those who are unqualified or simply not a good fit.

My favorite part is that Covey’s tool is fully customizable to our needs. I can get as specific as I want, and their team will build a custom sourcing code just for us. It doesn’t matter if you're a hiring manager, a founder, or just a recruiter with way too much on your plate—book a demo with Covey if you're looking for a weight to come off your shoulders.