What Google asks of its product marketing interviewees

Well, tempus sure does fugit, and I see that it’s been a good long time since I’ve posted on OM. OMG.

I really do want to air an opinion over here weekly.

Let’s see if I can get my act together here. Somehow I manage to post every weekday over on Pink Slip….

Anyway, the other day my brother-in-law sent me a link to a blog post by Lewis Lin, a career coach, who, among other things, offers his clients Google-specific practice interviews. His post was on the questions - including the trick ones - that Google asks folks on interviews. You know, the ones like ‘why is a manhole covers round?’, and ‘how much would you charge to wash every window in Seattle?’

While some of the questions have known answers* - a manhole is round so that it doesn’t fall in - for others, no one cares about the actual right answer: they just want to see how you think a problem through.

When I saw that Lin had Google questions broken down by position, I eagerly clicked into see what questions they asked Product Marketing Managers.

Yawn!

Slug in any old company and product names, and this could be Classic Interview: Anywhere USA.

• Why do you want to join Google?
• What do you know about Google’s product and technology?
• If you are Product Manager for Google’s Adwords, how do you plan to market this?
• What would you say during an AdWords or AdSense product seminar?
• Who are Google competitors, and how does Google compete with them?
• Have you ever used Google’s products? Gmail?
• What’s a creative way of marketing Google’s brand name and product?
• If you are the product marketing manager for Google’s Gmail product, how do you plan to market it so as to achieve 100 million customers in 6 months?

No brain teasers? No ‘how many golf balls fit in a school bus?’, which would check on a candidate’s basic comfort level with numbers. No ‘how much would you charge to wash all the windows in Seattle’ - which would have gauged a product marketer’s ability to think about pricing. Not even the ‘in three sentences, explain what a database is to your eight year old nephew’, an obvious test of someone’s ability to write clearly and succinctly on a technical topic.

Sure, the questions they do ask are decent ones, but couldn’t they have been just a bit more creative here?  Maybe something along the lines of, ‘You work for the company known to hire the smartest people in the whole wide world. How would you effectively communicate with the morons who use our products?’ (I guess that’s the eight year old nephew question. Darn, I am so not googlishly creative.)

Or how about, ‘Your mother is worried about loss or privacy. Explain to her what she’ll gain by having information on every purchase she’s made online, not to mention every web page she’s ever clicked on, out there in the big honking database you just explained to her grandson.”

Or, ‘One of our beliefs is that democracy on the web works. Do you have any doubts about whether this is always going to be true.’

Or my personal favorite question to ask prospective product marketers: ‘If you were going to be stranded on a desert island for a couple of days, would you rather be with engineers or sales people, and why? And just to we don’t skew this towards the engineers, you’ll have ample food and bev, shelter, and a known rescue date. (If you answer engineers, welcome to product marketing; if you answer sales people, there may be an opening in marcom.)

Truly, I am disappointed that Google thinks so little about product marketing folks that we’re not worth anything beyond the most pedestrian of questions. And I can’t for the life of me figure out why, proving - what else is new - that I am just not bright enough to work for Google. Good thing I’m not looking for a job.

 

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*I have a couple of other answers: a) a manhole cover is round because a manhole is round; and b) a manhole cover is round because it’s easier to roll a heavy object than it is to lift and carry it. So there.

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