What's the biggest weakness you see among experienced candidates for product marketing positions?

I touched on this briefly as a response to another (scaling a product marketing team) question but a lot of what I've seen from a hiring perspective is a lack of research into the company and some of the core aspects of the business they're trying to get hired into. Obviously it has to be public facing information and they shouldn't be expected to know all the moving parts of the business but I've interviewed seasoned PMM's who really couldn't 'pitch' some of our core (and best known) products back to me in any conceivable way. They're too reliant on their experience and their resume to do some research on the company they're interviewing with and I think that's a huge flaw. The other one that I'm particularly picky with is passion. I want to see genuine excitement for the role. Why are they SO excited to join this company and go after this opportunity? Are they genuinely passionate about the opportunity? Its really easy to see the ones that aren't even if they're trying to be. I often find younger PMM's are way more genuinely excited about an opportunity but seasoned PMM's might have lost that spark.

One area that I generally push to understand is the ability to tie their work to business impact. I've interviewed many candidates who have led impressive product launches or been part of a big growth story. When they speak about their experience, I try to understand why they decided to go in a specific direction, what did they learn that made them change course, and how the results ladder up to the overall business goals. I want to hear them articulate how a successful launch ultimately contributed to their team's growth targets. 

Ability to get stuff done while also driving strategy. To me, a PMM leader still needs to roll up their sleeves and driving a keynote deck, create foundational messaging for a team, get in front of customers. The messaging/positioning muscle atrophies fast. When interviewing potential leaders, I always probe into recent projects to understand how hands on they are, what they actually did vs directed, and if they have passion for the discipline. Good PMM leaders will always need to get hands on for key projects and not all of them are great at jumping in.

I'll tell you a few of the red flags that immediately turn me off a candidate:

1. too many "I" statements. PMM is so collaborative, so cross-functional...if you are making it sound like YOU did all this stuff on your own, either I fully doubt it, or in fact that tells me something was wrong.

2. Speaking in too many absolutes. When I ask about how you do a thing, if you respond like there's one way - that actually makes me feel like you're just quoting the textbook. I love when a candidate says "well it depends...in this scenario, I did it like this. In that scenario, I did it like that" shows me that you're connecting insight through to strategy through to execution and I'm more confident that you'll be able to apply that experience to a new situation.