What do you look for while hiring a junior PMM candidate, especially someone who might not have had a prior PMM experience? What assignments would you typically ask as part of recruitment?

1. writing skill: the messaging side of the marketing house, so you need to learn how to write. 
2. presentation skill: you're not just enabling sales, but also marketing so can you present your ideas succintly 
3. intellectual curiousity: you're task with taking new products to market or going into new segments. 

I would look at those three as the initial pillars to gage someone who is ready to be in PMM. 

Generally a great product marketer is built on three knowledge pillars: 

1. Market Knowledge
2. Product Knowledge
3. Marketing Knowledge

In the case of somebody brand new to product marketing, having just one of these would be fantastic. For junior roles, I'm selecting candidates based on their likelihood to develop these three areas of expertise. My go-to case assignment is asking the candidate to identify a market and segment, approximate its size, then craft a positioning statement and message for an offering to that audience. The instructions include a "time limit" and our positioning statement structure.

The real insight comes in the review of the prepared materials. I focus on "how" questions so I can better understand the candidates approach to each component. From a high-level I'm looking for indications of empathy for the market segment and their problem along with a reasoned approach to approximating the market size.