Product-led Recruitment
Firstly, let’s define these different forms of recruitment for innovation professions:
- Sales-led recruitment: we sell what we’re asked for, we don’t check industry standards
- Marketing-led recruitment: the market is increasingly distorted, we anticipate new biases and we sell them
- Product-led recruitment: we know what we’re talking about and we sell the truth
How do we get there?
Peer-to-peer recruitment is the most obvious form. The problem is that companies, especially startups, don’t necessarily respect the industry either; your Product Manager peer may have a biased view of the job.
Slightly better is the peer network, which allows for enhanced industry expertise and higher-quality recruitment. Here, too, the private version is potentially biased toward the dominant tribe rather than an open version based on standards.
An example of a peer-to-peer network:
https://www.theproductfolks.com/
Rather than the private version (more of an American culture), why not the European version where the entire market is regulated so that our less brilliant friends don’t get ripped off?
IT service providers failed
IT service providers carry more weight than any single person or company, with their primary purpose being to bring expertise to the market. This role of initiator of change was taken on at the beginning of the great wave of digital transformation, 15 years ago, then abandoned, leading to the current situation described as the Product Management Theater by Marty Cagan.
From a situation where IT service providers fully assumed their role, we have moved to a situation where they are gradually being eroded by end customers in a position of power and fearful. Then, from an abuse of a dominant position, we moved to a relationship of collusion, with a deliberate distortion relayed through false advertising to employees and freelancers at the end of the chain. As in a long negotiation, IT service providers stopped thinking and became emotional, to the detriment of their lower-level business partners.
If IT service providers don’t have the clout to maintain strong standards in the market, it’s up to the governments to intervene.
To make product-led recruitment the norm
👉 Our Big Techs, regulation of innovation professions in Europe
