How to prepare for Amazon’s bar raiser interviews
I spent 15 years at Amazon. I was a Bar Raiser for 12 of those years and a member of the Bar Raiser Core team (a handful of Execs who oversee the program) for 8 years. I conducted an average of 5 interviews per week across a wide variety of positions at Amazon, ranging from […]
by Bill Carr
How Amazon’s debrief process ensures hiring the best
One of the most important parts of Amazon’s hiring process happens after the interviews are over. It is called the debrief, but it isn’t just a recap of “How it went.” It’s a data synthesis meeting that determines if the candidate raises the bar. Debriefs are ideally scheduled for the same day or the day […]
by Bill Carr
Overcoming hiring biases with Amazon’s Bar Raiser process
Bias is bad. As a leader, you should be looking to eliminate it from any decisions. In every hiring process, three deadly biases can thwart organizations from making the right hiring decisions: the urgency bias, the confirmation bias, and the personal bias. 200,000 years of programming, which helped us survive in small hunter-gatherer tribes (e.g., […]
by Bill Carr
How behavioral interviews predict candidate success
Behavioral interviews help predict performance by uncovering how a candidate has acted in real situations rather than relying on their hypothetical responses. This is why Amazon and other top companies rely on this method. They evaluate the candidate in terms of: → What did they do when presented with a new challenge? → How did […]
by Bill Carr
How Amazon’s Bar Raiser program improves hiring quality
I spent 15 years at Amazon and watched the Bar Raiser program go from a quirky internal concept to one of the most powerful tools in the company. It is so effective because it injects skilled experts into a process typically dominated by people who are not good at interviewing and hiring. Most managers are […]
by Bill Carr
Balancing hire slow and fire fast for better team outcomes
“Hire slow, fire fast” is common advice, but in practice, most leaders struggle to follow this advice. Typically, leaders are in a rush to fill open roles, and then they hang on to struggling employees for too long. Whether a manager is backfilling a current position or creating a new one, leaving the position open […]
by Bill Carr
Why behavioral questions outperform hypothetical interview queries
During my 15 years at Amazon, I interviewed hundreds of candidates. One shift I had to make was abandoning interview questions that were hypothetical, case or modeling questions, or in any way not behavioral. There are two problems with hypotheticals: 1) They tell you how a candidate will think, but not how they will behave, […]
by Bill Carr
The history and impact of amazon’s bar raiser hiring program
One famous Amazon process is the “Bar Raiser” system for hiring. It was developed around 1999 as a response to the hiring challenges that came with rapid scaling. Here is some history and how you can choose bar raisers to maintain quality hiring as you scale: 1) How and why the Bar Raiser program was […]
by Bill Carr
How honest reviews maintain a high-performance culture
As a manager, the easy thing to do is to give everyone a great performance review. This avoids conflict, but it is short-sighted. At Amazon, we believed that a high-performance culture required honesty even when it was uncomfortable. The company put systems in place to make sure that happened. One example was the promotion process. […]
by Bill Carr
Balancing professionalism and personal identity at work
I could not agree more with the author of this Op Ed. As he points out, many people have taken the concept of “bring your whole self to work” too far. I entered the workforce in 1989. Expectations were different then. Like everyone, I dressed in formal business attire— I wore a suit and tie […]
by Bill Carr