The LinkedIn APM Interview Process ✨
Insights from each round of the interview!
Thank you to Cindy Zhang for writing about her experiences interviewing for and landing an APM role at LinkedIn in such great detail. Please go thank her if you benefit from this article! 😊
Before we dive in, here’s a bit about Cindy:
My Background
I recently graduated from UC Berkeley (go bears!) where I double majored in Computer Science and Business Admin. During my undergrad, I was heavily involved with a club called Blueprint where we built tech for non-profits, as well as a professional engineering fraternity. When I first entered college, I wanted to pursue a career in business, and so my first 2 internships were in marketing and business analytics. However, I realized that my true interests lie in building products people love, and so I interned as a PM at Splunk during my junior summer. You can find more about my professional experiences on my LinkedIn!
The LinkedIn APM Process
Interview Outline
Behavioral Recruiter Phone Screen (30 min)
Product Sense Interview (45 min) + Writing Sample
Final Round Interviews (30 min each):
Product Sense
Product Execution
Leadership/Behavioral
Ecosystem/Behavioral
Hearing Back
I applied for the role on September 12th last year (which I believe was the day apps opened, and coincidentally the day we start this year!) and heard back September 14th from my recruiter. In the email, my recruiter noted that she found my resume from the GraceHopper Conference resume database, and a friend of mine who also heard back said the recruiter reached out after seeing her LinkedIn profile, so make sure to keep your public profiles polished, and put yourself out there, wherever you can! 😎
1st Round: Recruiter Phone Screen
Nothing out of the ordinary here - be prepared to answer your classic questions like “Tell me about yourself.” and “What’s a time you led a project?”. One thing I noticed throughout all the interviews at LinkedIn is that everyone is very mission driven, and will often ask you about why you want to work there. Understand their mission and values, and tie it into a narrative that shows how it aligns with your own goals!
2nd Round: Product Sense Interview + Writing Sample Take Home
Once you get past the phone screen, you’ll be invited to both a product sense interview and a take home exercise.
Starting off with the product sense interview, I was pretty prepared to jump right into a classic “Design x for x” type of question. Though I’m sure it depends highly on your interviewer (meaning you really might get one of those questions), I was pretty taken aback when my interviewer decided to deep dive into my past experiences through a product perspective. For example, they started off by asking me about my previous internship, from questions like “What did you do to improve the product you worked on?” to “If you could change anything about the company, what would you change?”.
They covered all my experiences, even asking me a couple of questions about my freshman year internship from 3 years ago! Biggest takeaway here is to know your resume inside out: make sure you can spin stories out of your achievements, and to highlight elements not written on there.
The Take Home Challenge
The LinkedIn Take Home challenge is quite different from other ones you might face, in the sense that it asks for a very classic written report (specifically, 2 pages with 11 pt font and double spaced) compared to a deck you might make for other companies.
The prompt is very open ended - it simply asks you for your favorite product and why, as well as any improvements you’d make. I’m sure if you’re studying for PM interviews already you have a decent idea as to how to answer this, so I won’t focus on that aspect. Rather, I’d push you to think - given these limits on the take home challenge, how can you communicate most effectively with what you’ve been allotted?
Try to think outside the box in terms of how you’d structure your report (eg. use tables to contrast pros/cons?), forms of communication (eg. would this info be clearer in paragraph form vs. a graph or diagram) and how you can play with words themselves (eg. using color to highlight strengths and weaknesses, bold main takeaways, etc.). Reviewers will be looking through hundreds of these - even before they actually read any words from your assignment, they should be able to visually see that you can assess and select the most effective methods of communication!
Final Round Interviews
Before jumping into advice for each interview, the most important general piece of advice I’d give is to remember that each of your interviewers have LinkedIn profiles, and because they’re LinkedIn PMs, they’re stacked with info about themselves!!! Don’t just look through their experiences, look also at their activity: posts, comments, what they’ve engaged in. I thought this was a really great way to paint a picture of the interviewer, of their values, what news/developments in tech they’re excited about, and can lead to really great Q&A periods and insightful convos.
Product Sense + Product Execution
These interviewers were pretty standard - I was given questions that fell under the “Design x for x” and “What metrics would you measure for x” structure. Circling back to the general advice of familiarizing yourself on the interviewers beforehand, I noticed my Product Sense interviewer literally had a video pinned to their LinkedIn profile on how to approach these questions, and was able to use elements they talked about in the video which I’m sure helped tick more of their boxes.
Leadership
Be prepared to have stories of past leadership experiences, but also be prepared to be thrown into hypothetical situations! For example, a question I got asked was, “Your team has a very important deadline to meet soon, but your team isn’t getting allotted enough resources. What do you do?”. I was pretty unprepared for this, as there aren’t general frameworks you can really fall back on when it comes to ambiguous questions. This is where really going through your thought process is important! For this question, I thought about all the stakeholders I could reach out to, and brainstormed how they would potentially be able to help. From there, I assessed pros and cons of major options, and decided on a path forward.
Ecosystem
This interview tests your knowledge and care for the LinkedIn product. One important thing to understand is that LinkedIn has a bunch of business lines in both B2B (Hire, Market, Sell and Learn. Find more info here) and B2C (though not explicitly listed, think Premium, Ads, Jobs, etc.). Think about the synergy between all the business lines and which product features support them. It’s also useful to have key facts prepared to support your answers, some useful ones I had were:
774M members, 58M companies, 120K schools, 38k skills
60% of users are 25 - 34
80% of all B2B leads are found on LinkedIn
Average user session is 11 min.
It’s a lot of info and it feels overwhelming when you think about how much there is to research, but you don’t need to know everything! Just know enough to tackle challenging questions such as, “What do you think is the most important feature on LinkedIn?”.
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