I was initially contacted by a recruiter who thought my background would be a good fit, even though the job description contained several bullet points concerning marketing and I had no experience in that area. He passed my resume on to the hiring manager who within a couple of days called me to set up a phone interview.
The phone interview was a lot more like a conversation rather than a barrage of questions and the hiring manager seemed a lot more interested in my technical background (engineering degree, project engineer, manufacturing manager) than he did my lack of marketing experience so somewhere in the interview I actually was the one to bring that up. He seemed to think that the marketing was something that I could learn as long as I had the technical credentials to understand how their products worked and my experience with issues in logistics, manufacturing, and all the other processes involved in moving a product to market. Towards the end of the interview he asked me some technical questions, basic physics and electrical engineering principles, which obviously were related to how their products worked. He was obviously satisfied that I should at least get a person-to-person interview and, since the hiring manager's office was out of town, I was set up to interview with his boss who was already scheduled to be in Houston the next week.
The in-person interview was held at the company's Houston office and I sat down with the HR manager and we were later joined by the VP. I had done a good bit of online homework on the company and brought up a few points to the HR manager as he gave me an overview of the company. When the VP came in he asked me to give a narrative of my work history and I went by my resume, trying not to add too much so as not to get long-winded and boring. The VP stopped me several times and asked for more information, sometimes about a product I had worked with just because he had an engineering background and was curious on how it worked and sometimes because he would ask me to frame a particular experience in terms of product management. The VP, too, asked some technical questions of me and said that the Product Manager needed to be able to understand the physics and electronics behind their products when speaking to their own engineers and to the clients. I brought up the marketing skills myself and said that I didn't have much experience there as my previous company sold all their instrumentation products internally and it was their services they sold externally. I related that the hiring manager had said he would be my mentor and that I felt I could learn those skills quickly.
I called the recruiter after the interview so that he could debrief me and found out that the company's previous product manager had only been with them for less than a year. Apparently when hired that person had strong project management skills but no marketing skills and didn't ramp up as quickly as had been expected. I think this played significantly into why I wasn't offered the position. I understand that they also interviewed one other person and I'm guessing that the other candidate had comparable technical skills to mine but also had some previous marketing experience.
