Please review my Exceptional Talent application (Product Manager)

Stage 1
1

Please help me review the evidence I plan to provide for the Global Talent Route for Leader (I’m a Product Manager. I have a total 5+ years of work experience working at an Edtech and an AI company)

Letters of Recommendations:

  1. Head of Product & Content Strategy at Coursera, USA (worked with me at Edtech company). They are an ex-PM at Amazon, Microsoft, Udacity + studied CS from UC San Diego

  2. AVP at an Indian EdTech Unicorn with a billion-dollar valuation (worked with me at Edtech company)

  3. They are a Founder & CEO at AI Automation company from the USA who raised funding of $8 million last year (also an ex-Microsoft Principal Engg. Manager at Redmond)

Mandatory Criteria:

  1. Proof of getting 3 awards:
    a. Technology & Innovation Leader of the Year Award 2023-24 (for my AI work) + mention of the judging panel / jury who decided to give this award (President of Deloitte, President of PwC India etc. in the jury) + news clipping with my name in it with a readership of 500K per month)+ photo of me accepting the award virtually
    b. Young Achievers Award (Technology) 2023-24 by an Indian award body which has been giving this award for 20+ years + my profile on their official page with list of winners + my photo with the trophy
    c. DAAD Award/Scholarship 2019 - given to few individuals globally every year by Govt. of Germany to invite people to come and research in Germany free-of-cost

  2. Proof of being a Jury Member/Panel Judge at 2 social-impact incubators in India (proof substantiated by photos from the events, Linkedin posts, and reference letter from the CEO of the incubator stating why I was invited + what was my impact at the 2 events)

  3. Proof of being a Judge at a Globally reputed award for tech startups where other judge panel members include high-profile people such as Engineering Managers & Senior Product Managers from Meta, Netflix, USA. Proof via judge badge + certificate + official email inviting me as a judge + proof from their website stating rigorous judge selection criteria.

Optional 2:

  1. Proof of speaking at an Adobe e-commerce & tech conference in India with 1000+ attendees + my name in the list of speakers on their official website + my photos at the main stage

  2. Proof of speaking at a Cloud conference in India with 600+ attendees + my name in the list of speakers on their official website + my photos at the main stage + reference letter from organiser of this conference stating why I was invited to speak + how was my talks’ response on the audience

  3. Mentorship experience of a structured PM mentoring programme in India with a selection criteria + other acceptance letters from other mentorship programs where mentors are selected based on merit (from an incubator in UAE, a free-of-cost mentorship prorgamme in UK & Europe, accelerator in USA) + reference letter from one of the mentees (Founder of an early-stage AI startup who was part of the UAE incubator)

  4. 2 news articles from 2023 mentioning my impact in Edtech and social-impact startups in India + along with screenshot of monthly readership of one of the articles (700K readers per month) + snippets from the article + letter of support from an ex-Program Manager at Google USA who knows my work in Edtech which was described in the article (they worked with me in the same Edtech back in 2019).

Optional 3:

  1. Proof of commanding a high salary ---->>> (salary X) —>> at least 150% higher than the avg PM in India (will show avg PM salary in India from Payscale) + show its in Y% percentile of India + letter of bonus + ESOPs

  2. Proof of my work at Edtech company + dashboard screenshots showing impact on revenue, user enrollments, user feedback etc. + show public links/blogs of the actual product on the official company page + 1 pg reference letter from Principal ML Engineer stating my contribution to these products + impact

  3. Proof of my work at AI company + dashboard screenshots showing impact on revenue, new sales deal, efficiency metrics etc. + show public links/blogs of the actual product on the official company page + 1 pg reference letter from Head of Product stating I led the development of these products

Let me know of deficiencies in these evidences. Thank you!

2

Will be very grateful if you could help me with this! @ask4jubad @Francisca_Chiedu @May @alexnk

3

Nice set of evidences!

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4

You have a very high chance if it is well arranged, consider adding a reference letter to back up your claim.

Having two speaking engagement in optional criteria seems too much and if you are using salary scale for exceptional talent, it weakens your application.

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5

Thank you for your help!

Can you please clarify to me a little bit more @LizzyOrji what we mean by “if you are using salary scale for exceptional talent, it weakens your application”? I do intend to use salary / contract / ESOP information for my application, so please let me know if:

  1. I should not use it at all?
  2. Or if I can use it but may need to restructure it a different way?

Thank you for your help!

6

Salary gets approved more for exceptional promise unless you really really are paid extremely higher than the average.
I would ask if you have another evidence to replace it, you should.

A lot of rejection emails from Exceptional talent has Salary as one of it’s downfall.

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