How To Find Product Manager Candidates For your Hiring Process

Is It Difficult to Find Great Product Manager Candidates?

Finding product manager candidates is difficult. The supply of good product managers is limited, and the number of job openings for product managers has been increasing.

One way to find great people is through referrals from your network. If you know a great candidate, ask them if they can pass along this information to someone else who might be interested in applying. You may also want to reach out to professional organizations like PMI or IIBA where many PMs congregate online and offline so that it's easy for them to review your open positions as well as give feedback about how you're doing things at your company.

What sources should you use to find great candidates?

• Referrals from current employees. If you have a product manager at your company, he or she might know someone who would be a great fit for your team. It’s worth asking them to refer candidates for open positions—you never know who they may know!
• Social media, including LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Are you using social media to find candidates? If so, put these tools to work by searching for product managers online. You can also use hashtags like #ProductManager on Twitter to find people in our industry tweeting about their jobs or experiences as PMs.
• Job boards like Glassdoor and Indeed will pull up many job listings related specifically to product management positions—and they're known as being good sources of quality applicants as well.
• Blog posts and other online content written by product managers themselves are another way that hiring managers can learn more about what makes someone great at this role beyond just looking at their resume alone. Conferences, meetups, and other events where technology professionals gather together are also excellent places where you could meet potential candidates face-to-face and even better yet if those events happen locally!

Use referrals as a source of candidates

When you’re sourcing potential candidates, it’s always a good idea to ask for referrals. These aren’t necessarily your best friends or closest contacts, but they can help you find great people who are like-minded and will work well with your team.

Referrals come with a recommendation from someone that knows the candidate well—this can be extremely useful when trying to determine if someone is right for the position or not. You may also have an easier time getting answers about their personality and work ethic by asking them about their colleagues than if you were just contacting strangers online yourself.

Get the word out on social media

LinkedIn is a great place to find potential candidates. It's also one of the most effective ways of spreading the word about your hiring process, as people on LinkedIn are more likely to pay attention if someone they know suggests them for a job opening. Use the following methods to get the word out:

• Send a personalized message straight from LinkedIn Recommendations (the tool used by recruiters and hiring managers).
• Post an ad on LinkedIn Jobs or send invitations via InMail instead of just following up with every single person who applied for your previous job postings—this way, you’ll be able to reach more people without being too intrusive or repetitive.

Twitter is another effective platform for spreading the news about open positions in your company, especially if those positions relate directly to what users might want to see on this social network anyway—like trends related specifically to technology professionals! Here are some tips:

• Engage and talk with people involved in product management. A lot of great product managers post threads talking about how they handled difficult or interesting situations in different businesses. Reading and commenting on these threads can help to connect and know each other so that later on you can introduce to them your open hiring process.
• Get referrals from people you engaged with. People on Twitter are very open and can help find more professionals you don't know yet. If you know product managers that are already established and happy in their job maybe they can help you meet other people that are looking for an opportunity.

Publish a job listing in multiple locations

There are a few places where you can post your product manager job listing. You can post it on the official LinkedIn pages of your company and the positions you have available, or you can publish it on the jobs page of a popular site like Indeed.com, which allows users to search for jobs by location and industry.

In addition to posting your job listing in these places, you should also consider publishing it on other social media platforms where people in your industry will see it, such as Facebook groups related to product management and software development.

Look for product managers who have written blog posts about their experiences

• Look for candidates who have written blog posts about their experiences.
• They probably have expertise in the area and are passionate about product management.
• Blog posts are a great source of candidates and knowledge about their skills.
• You can tell from the quality of their writing whether they're confident, which is a key trait for product managers to have.