Product Manager

Overview

You're building features for Paraform's recruiting marketplace, which means you're solving for two distinct user groups: companies posting roles and recruiters working those roles. You're working with engineering and design to ship product that increases placements (the core metric), improves matching quality, and keeps both sides of the marketplace engaged.

Role Snapshot

Company Context

Stage: Growth stage (184 employees, recently tripled office space)

Size: 184 employees

Growth: Team grew 10x in past year, rapidly scaling both tech and go-to-market

Market Position: Fast-growing recruiting marketplace competing against traditional agencies and other platforms

Product Reality

Marketplace Dynamics:

• You're managing a two-sided marketplace - need to build for companies AND recruiters
• Every feature impacts supply/demand balance
• Core success metric is placements (actual hires made through the platform)

Technical Constraints:

• Likely built on modern web stack, but moving fast means technical debt
• Integration needs: ATS systems, background check providers, payment processing
• Scaling challenges as recruiter and company volume grows

What You'll Actually Do

Time Breakdown

User Research/Data Analysis (25%) | Roadmap Planning (20%) | Working with Eng/Design (30%) | Stakeholder Management (15%) | Firefighting (10%)

Key Activities

• Feature Definition: You're writing specs for new product features. Recent examples might include: better recruiter-to-role matching algorithms, improved candidate submission workflows, payment dispute resolution tools, company analytics dashboards. You're defining requirements, writing user stories, working through edge cases with eng.
• User Research: You're talking to both sides of the marketplace - calling companies to understand why roles aren't getting filled, interviewing recruiters about why they're not engaging. You're analyzing data on where drop-off happens (roles posted but no recruiter interest? Recruiters applying but not getting selected? Candidates submitted but not hired?).
• Prioritization: You're juggling requests from sales ("companies need better analytics"), recruiter success team ("we need better quality controls"), operations ("payment flows are manual and breaking"), and executives ("we need to ship XYZ by end of quarter"). You're constantly re-prioritizing based on what drives placements.
• Working with Eng/Design: Daily standups, sprint planning, design reviews. You're answering eng questions, unblocking issues, making trade-off decisions on scope. You're working with designers on flows that work for very different user types (busy hiring managers vs professional recruiters).
• Metrics & Iteration: You're tracking product metrics post-launch - did the new matching algorithm increase recruiter-to-role conversion? Did the simplified submission form increase candidate quality? You're iterating based on data.

The Honest Reality

What's Hard

• Marketplace dynamics are brutal - you can't just build for one side. If you make it easier for recruiters to apply to roles, you might overwhelm companies with too many applicants. Every feature has second-order effects.
• You're measured on placements, which you don't directly control. You can ship great product, but if the recruiter pool is low-quality or the roles posted are impossible to fill, placements don't happen.
• Moving fast means technical debt piles up. You're often choosing between "build new feature" vs "fix the thing that's barely working." The pressure is to ship, not to polish.
• Stakeholders want everything yesterday. Sales wants features to close deals, ops wants tools to reduce manual work, execs want big bets. You're constantly saying no.
• Data is messy in a marketplace. Attribution is hard - did the placement happen because of your new feature or because a great recruiter joined the platform?

What Success Looks Like

• Increasing placement rate (% of posted roles that result in a hire)
• Reducing time-to-first-candidate (how fast recruiters submit after being matched to a role)
• Improving match quality (companies selecting from matched recruiters more often)
• Shipping features that move core business metrics (not vanity features)

Who You're Working With

Internal Stakeholders:

• Engineering team (you're partnering with 3-5 engineers)
• Design team (likely 1-2 designers)
• Sales team (constantly asking for features to help close deals)
• Recruiter success team (managing recruiter experience)
• Operations (handling payments, disputes, edge cases)
• Founders/execs (setting strategic direction)

External Users:

• Talent leaders at companies (want simple, fast workflow to post roles and review candidates)
• Recruiters on the platform (want to find good roles, submit candidates easily, get paid fast)

Requirements

• 3-5 years product management experience, ideally with marketplaces or two-sided platforms
• Understanding of marketplace dynamics (supply/demand, network effects, chicken-and-egg problems)
• Experience working with engineers and designers in an agile environment
• Data-driven approach - comfortable with SQL, analytics tools, A/B testing
• Comfort with ambiguity and fast iteration (this is not a "polish everything" environment)
• Recruiting/talent tech experience a plus but not required