Group Presentation Evaluation: Fill & Download for Free

If your interview process is well-designed, no single thing should make you want to hire a candidate. Over-indexing on any particular point or aspect will do nothing except inject bias, randomness and noise into a process already rife with all three. Instead, you should adopt a process to minimize noise and bias and then trust the process.If minimizing bias and randomness is your goal—and it should be, for both moral and business reasons—snap judgements are your enemy; you want to avoid making conclusions with your gut and restrict yourself to systematic evaluation which has, ideally, been validated with actual data and research.A pattern I’ve seen over and over is interviewers who effectively expect candidates to read their minds. This can take different forms:questions with trick answers—if you don’t know the trick, you don’t pass the interviewunasked-for details in the answer—the candidate can answer the question as asked, but unless they also volunteer something additional (how to scale the answer 1000x, for example), they don’t passhow the answer is presented—evaluating based on how a candidate writes on the whiteboard, how they “think aloud”… etcthe answering process—evaluating how the candidate answers a question (candidates are penalized if they don’t ask enough clarifying questions, don’t gather requirements… etc)A few of these patterns—like trick questions—are always counterproductive. The rest can be fine as long as you tell the candidate what you’re looking for. But too many interviewers don’t say anything: they present a normal interview question and then silently ding the candidate for not doing something extra that wasn’t explicitly in the scope of the question.The theory, I suppose, is that a person who doesn’t exhibit desirable habits in interviews won’t have them in day-to-day work either. I don’t buy it. Interviews are such a different environment from actual work that whether or not candidates do something extra without being asked means little. If a candidate writes messy, rushed code in an interview, it’s probably because they’re nervously answering a synthetic problem on a whiteboard with a time limit, not because that’s what they do in their day-to-day code.Looking for behavior you didn’t ask for in an interview will tell you nothing about how a candidate actually works; it only selects for candidates with an unspoken understanding of the same interviewing norms you know. An illustrative example I’ve seen is a candidate getting dinged in a review for not using the right phrases when discussing a mathematical concept. That tells us something about the social groups a candidate is part of (they don’t “sound” like a mathematician) but nothing about how well they actually understand math! It’s nothing but a shibboleth.I feel that this is a particular problem for “red flags”: if you reject candidates who didn’t read your mind well enough, you’re going to reject perfectly qualified people and actively bias the process in favor of people who think like you do (or, at least, live in social circles with the same interviewing norms). However, it’s still a problem for the same reasons even when it only gives candidates a boost. Being able to read the interviewer’s mind should not be a factor in either direction. Even if it only comes up in the candidate’s favor, it still biases the process in the same way, just to a smaller extent.The core goals of an interview process should be fairness, accuracy and consistency. You need to approach interviewing with a scientific mindset—you’re developing a repeatable experiment to predict whether somebody will be a strong hire. Individual factors that “make you immediately want to hire somebody” do not contribute to this goal. Your process should try to minimize these, not encourage them.

That depends mostly on the theme of the presentation. If current affairs thenUSA visa issues, Indo-china border issues, North Korea missile test, Parise global warming conference, removal of subsidy on LPG in India, development of high-speed Railway in India, the evaluation of Modi government at foreign frent and in India are good topics.

I see successful product managers adopting a variety of styles depending on the situation and group, rather than sticking with only one interaction style. Which means that introverts will sometimes need to step out of their comfort zone, just as extroverts will need to…It’s entirely authentic to understand your current work/group setting and find a communication model that gets the right things done. (Cf: Myers-Briggs or any similar framework. Every seasoned product manager should put her/himself through a few sessions.) For instance:When brainstorming solutions and metrics with a development team, it’s useful to identify if this team (like most engineering groups) tends toward introverts, paced thinking, and careful use of language. To keep from dominating the conversation — and getting to a poor solution — the PM might play facilitator to get the quietest team members to speak up and contribute; try to lead the group through idea generation and then into evaluation mode; explicitly hold back from overriding the group too early with strong PM opinions. Introverted? Maybe, but deliberately useful in the context.Same day, different meeting with sales leadership about what’s on the roadmap — and what’s deep in the uncommitted backlog. Left to themselves, sales execs will fall into single-account storytelling about how Feature X would have closed Account Y. So the PM has to take strong, vocal command of the meeting and (repeatedly) pull it back on track. If this is a “ratify” meeting where we need general agreement, it might include banging on the table and demanding show-of-hands votes. Extroverted? Maybe, but deliberately useful in the context.It may be as hard for extroverts to allow room for quiet discussion as it is for introverts to grab the microphone and shout. But IMO being stuck at either end is limiting. (Introverts may re-energize after some loud/extroverted time by sitting, thinking, reading, or just being by themselves. Likewise, extroverts may need to go out drinking with the sales team after keeping themselves in check during a long day with engineers. We gotta figure out what works and keeps up authentic and productive.)Introverts may find large-group presentations difficult, even terrifying. I did. But after 20 or 30 or 40 presentations, it’s easier to fake enthusiasm. And after 100, it becomes natural. I’m not an extrovert, but I sometimes play one on TV.