Interview Bias
There is ALWAYS bias in an interview. Bias can creep in and impact your results in a number of places.
This is a list of biases I have seen come up time and again. You can't control all of them but you can mitigate some of them.
Interviewer not properly trained: Not all companies properly train PMs. I have seen widely different standards for good and bad applied at the same company.
Experience Bias: The interviewer might think this was how they were graded in their interview. Their understanding might be completely wrong but little you can do about it.
Recency Bias/Group Think: The first person in a panel gives negative feedback. The group anchors on that even if the rest originally have positive feedback. (This is common in promotion discussions as well.)
Similar Interests/Background: There is a reason it is harder for minorities to break the cycle, humans are wired to like people who look and sound like them. No matter how much training people are given. If you mention something in your answer that is familiar to them, the human across from you will like you more.
Too much freedom in questions and logic: The questions are not consistent because the company allows people to make up their own questions. And some teams don’t share questions asked and you get repeat questions.
Luck of the Draw: Sometimes you get a question where you know the topic, and sometimes you get something you know nothing about.
Hiring Committee Relies on Notes: In some companies the people who interview you are not on the hiring panel. So if your interviewer takes bad or sparse notes, you might be unfairly graded.
Years of Experience: Some companies have a bias for number of years of product management experience. For example you might have 10 years in a product company, 6 in engineering and 4 as a PM. For some companies, you are seen as a junior candidate because 4 years in product isn't even considered mid-career.
Accent Makes You Hard to Understand: If you have any sort of accent, and the interviewer can't understand you, they may ding you under communication. It is up for debate if this is fair or not. An engineer who can code, doesn't need to speak clearly to be successful, but a PM who works cross-functionally must be understood by multiple audiences.
Thrown off your game: Sometimes technical difficulty or meetings get in the way and your interview gets off to a rough start. You just had a bad day, but you don't get a do over for that.
For all these reasons and more, getting inconsistent results from mock interviews is a good reason to take all feedback as a positive gift.
For me, the best feedback I got was being told I didn't cover a topic/issue I know without a doubt I addressed. But I did so when my mock interviewer was taking notes, and so they missed it entirely. That feedback taught me to slow down, drip my 'roadmap', summarize and watch for when my interviewer was taking a lot of notes while I said something important.
Ask yourself: What was the last piece of feedback you got that you thought was unfair? How does that prepare me for the realities of a live interview?
Other articles in this series include:
