Hiring Failure in the Age of Take-Home Assignments
I am going to reflect on mistakes I made that impacted hiring decisions. This led me to ask for a take-home assignment from product management candidates. I want to share this as an introduction to demystifying rejections after completing a take-home assignment.
This article is also part of a series where I explain the problems (and causes) of take-home assignments for product managers.
Take-Home Assignments
How do my personal failures have anything to do with take-home assignments?
If you read no further, there are so many personal and organizational reasons people ask for take-homes and for how they grade them. If you are a strong product manager who fails a take-home, please remember it is not necessarily a reflection of your skills. There are internal dynamics and failure to identify potential and talent that leads hiring managers to rely on take-home assignments.
NOTE: Our current hiring process if filled with flaws and biases. No process is perfect, you can pick apart any process from behavioral to case. But given the rise of take-home assignments, I wanted to dive in a little more to their flaws.
You could answer the prompt perfectly, given the information they shared but they (1) wanted something they didn’t tell you about or (2) hearing you makes them realize they wanted something else.
This doesn’t mean everyone reading deserves an offer, but it does mean that sometimes there is more to the decision-making process than meets the eye.
The same can be said for behavioral and case interviews, but asking for a take-home assignment is a heavy lift and so is taken with much more thought than a behavioral interview. There is more behind it than meets the eye. A take-home requires a deeper framing and self-reflection if it is to be graded properly.
The mistakes I made :
Failed to Ask More: Wanting a new challenge soo badly, I didn’t dive deeply to investigate the team I was joining. I ended up on a team with little trust and a written take-home solved internal conflict issues.
Power Dynamics I let myself be intimidated into hiring the first that came along. When that person failed, it meant trust was fractured on all sides of the leadership team.
Trust in Friends Biased towards someone I valued meant I didn’t investigate enough. I used trust as a proxy and it failed me.
Overconfidence Arrogantly thought I could coach anyone with some product experience into being a fit for the role.
Blind to Aggressive Behaviors I was being bullied by someone and didn’t realize it. I let the bullying lead me to question myself and then make bad hiring decisions.
Now, I am not saying that my mistakes are those of the company you are interviewing with, but I am saying that anyone I was interviewing at the time had no idea this was going on in the background.
The key lesson for candidates: if you know your response was a strong one, and those you shared it with felt you knocked it out of the park, there might be a few more issues at play. For example:
Conflict between Product & Engineering I had a client who found out after the interview that the key product decision-maker was actually a self-described program manager. There was a serious disconnect in expectations and grading criteria for the case.
Good Answer, Different Goal Sometimes the take-home assignment is answered well but reveals weaknesses in what the hiring team asked. Hearing a good answer might make them realize they need something more.
Recruiter Message vs Product Team Message Recruiters are great at sourcing and selling, but they don’t know what it means to do the product job day-to-day, so they have to translate what the hiring team needs into a simple message for the candidate. Sometimes the message is confusing and so they give you bad instructions or fail to ask the right questions of the team they are working for.
Bias for another candidate in the pool This can take many forms from the hiring manager to an influential cross-functional partner looking for a particular person or set of traits, regardless of the presentation.
Bad hire before makes people gun-shy Maybe you were great but someone in the room saw a small indicator of something that was a trigger for them in the past.
Unrealistic Expectations I had one candidate provide a strong answer to the case prompt, and they were told it wasn’t creative enough in an operations-heavy space. They were the first candidate to answer the prompt. There is a high likelihood most of the candidates who followed gave similar answers because the expectations of the hiring team (startup) were more about their lack of knowledge in the space than the candidate’s performance. (This candidate probably dodged a bullet.)
The list goes on. The point is: There are many factors outside your control that impact final hiring decisions. This does not mean your presentation was perfect, but it also doesn’t mean it was horrible.
If you completed a take-home assignment and were rejected, dust yourself off. Learn from things you know went poorly, but don’t beat yourself up for things that were outside your control.
