I discuss, with a former Amazon Recruiter, how successful candidates prepare for and come across during the Amazon interview. Enjoy!

"Amazon gives you all the tools you need to succeed. They're going to tell you what their Leadership Principles are, they're going to tell you about the STAR process. Your Recruiter, if they are a good Recruiter, is going to call you beforehand and walk you through the process. There's no 'gotcha' questions. There's no questions that are completely unrelated to what you're interviewing for. Turn it into a conversation. Take a deep breath. Yawn before your interview, that's proven to calm you down at work. And just talk to another human being.

People tend to build up these interviews like they're bigger than they are, and they're not."

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I discuss the 'Hire and Develop the Best' Amazon Leadership Principle with Tyler Wallis on his podcast show 'Think Like Amazon'. I thought the conversation was useful and am republishing it here. Enjoy!

"If we can't as a team, get on that same point. And as a Bar Raiser, if I wasn't able to convince the rest of the group, then that means that I didn't do a very good job. So a performant Bar Raiser is someone who doesn't have the mindset of, 'I need to convince the team of my opinion.' Instead, a performant Bar Raiser is someone who is quite open to changing their mind. It's not about me being right versus other people being wrong. It's about, let's go down to the atomic level of indivisibility. The atomic data points or behavioral actions or illustrations, which are hard to dispute. And let's reach the decision at that point. 

And once we get there, if the other people's data who disagreed with me, if it's more eloquent than my data, then I would change my mind. A confident Bar Raiser is never afraid to change their mind. They are however very focused on achieving clarity and, in effect, almost like poking fights of: 'OK. If there's any area that's unclear and murky and we have not shed enough light on it, let's make sure to go there. And let's make sure that we get to that atomic indivisibility of data. So, once you do that, you'd be surprised how people tend to agree and they tend to come to the same conclusion."

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We talk with Martin, who interviewed for a Sr. Financial Analyst position with Amazon and received an offer, only to turn Amazon down to start his own startup, and later interview with Amazon again for a different position of Sr. Business Analyst.

"I've come to realize that qualified and experienced candidates get rejected for all kinds of legitimate reasons outside of their control. It might be COVID. In this case, by way of example, the jobs are getting filled in six weeks. It was still posted after five months, I just happened to notice that. And what that told me was that they probably cut the budgetary authority because of COVID. Or there were situations, I've had situations where I've had phone screens that didn't move forward, even though the interviewers seem to like me a lot, because, I found out later on, just by happenstance, that they already filled the position with an internal candidate that got on site before I did. Someone that is rejected from Amazon, if they have all of the other qualities and all the other experiences, one or two rejections shouldn't dissuade them."

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We talk with Pam, who recently interviewed for a Sr. Engagement Project Manager position with AWS.

"So, I arrived early, about 30 minutes early in fact, and checked into the front desk, and I thought I would use that that short time just to listen to some of my Leadership Scenarios that I had actually previously recorded so I can hear myself talking about them. And see how that came over in the communication aspect. And then being an experienced professional with many years of work, I was really encouraged by the amount of diversity I saw at Amazon: people walking up and down. So that was a very positive encouragement as well.

After about 20 minutes somebody came by they took me back to a room where the interview process was going to be held. However, I will say, out of the five people that were scheduled to interview me there's only two of them that were the original people. So, I had to improvise and be very flexible with the prepared questions that I had. So that's something important to note if things go off-script. An important plan is to be flexible and improvise."

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We talk with Shake, who was recently hired as a Sr. Business Development Manager with AWS.

"After having gone through interview loops several times and now having spent a few months, knowing the team: so much effort goes into the interview process, to make it useful. And that there is a ton of logic behind every decision being made. And, so at first, I mentioned being really anxious when I got negative news from the recruiting team, but now I know that, in hindsight, that would have been a really challenging role for me, and just was not a good fit. And so, it's less one-sided that Amazon's not evaluating you; they're validating you in context. And so, to have faith in the process of everyone is trying really hard to make it as positive an experience for you. And, really, just focus on yourself."

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We talk with Blandine, who was recently hired as a Content Acquisition Manager at Audible.

"I'd say don't give up and also just really be prepared. That's really the only way. What does it mean? Well, that really means work really hard because, essentially, the questions (at least, in my experience) were not hard. They were not necessarily unexpected questions, but it's about the delivery. You need to have your content ready, your responses ready. But you also need to have your delivery ready and that means we are rehearsing like a mad person."

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We talk with Shobhit, who was recently hired as an AWS Sr. Product Manager Intern.

"Amazon interviewing is all about that they are your lawyers. That's how I thought about it. I thought that he or she is my lawyer and I have to give them as much evidence as I can and make it really easy for them to take notes because at the end of the day they have to create and take notes. And then go and present me in front of a committee."

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Take a guess what your Amazon interviewer will do, once she has finished interviewing you, once she has shaken your hand and passed you to the next person on the loop.

You guessed it. Your interviewer will go back to her desk and will write a document. Just like everything else that Amazon’s employees do. The interviewer will prepare a written document, transcribing her recommendation of whether to hire you or not, based on your behavioral interview answers.

Once the interviewer posts her hiring recommendation, only then will she be able to see how everybody else has voted about you.

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If I told you: 'Hey, the sky is blue,' you would normally say: 'Yeah, the sky is blue. The sky has always been blue.' At Amazon, however, if you say that the sky is blue, others will ask you: 'Why is the sky blue?’. Then you should respond with: 'The sky is blue, because the molecules in the air, scatter the blue spectrum of the sunlight more than they scatter the red spectrum.’

Then you will hear another question: 'Why is that?'. And you would have to respond with: 'Because the blue spectrum of the light travels in shorter wavelengths.’ Then, you guessed it, a third follow-up question's going to be: 'Why does it travel in shorter wavelengths?’ on and on, until you reach down to the atomic level of why things are the way they are.

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Amazon is in the business of building flywheel businesses. A flywheel business, as Amazon defines it, is one that provides so much value and delight to customers that after a certain inflection point, the flywheel business reaches sufficient critical mass and starts accelerating faster and faster, under its own momentum.

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