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 University Interns to Vice Presidents and Senior Vice Presidents. I was the initial on-campus interviewer for many MBA interns, some of whom are now senior Execs at Amazon, including Sam Heyworth (VP of Consumables) and Matt Garman (CEO of AWS).
Finally, I was born in 1967, which means I am especially relevant right now—if you don’t understand that last part, ask a teenager.
Now that I’ve gotten that bragging off my chest, the point of the post is that I know a thing or two about the interview and hiring process at Amazon, so if you are thinking about working there, I have a few tips to help you.
1. Study Amazon’s Leadership Principles.
Amazon’s 16 Leadership Principles (LPs) are woven into every decision and every process —beginning with the hiring process. The criteria for who to hire and not hire are based on an evaluation of where each candidate (you) exceeds, meets, or falls short on each Leadership Principle.
Unlike a test like the ACT where you could be asked to solve an endless variety of problems, the Amazon interview test is limited to 16 topics. The more time you spend studying the principles and thinking about how these would be put into practice, plus examples from your career where you have done so, the better prepared you will be.
In other words, every question is going to be related to a leadership principle, e.g, “Tell me about a time when you had to Dive Deep into the data to analyze and solve a significant problem?”
2. Write down examples of your past work for each Leadership principle.
In addition to being an open-book test, it is also an open-note test. Start a Word or Google Doc, create a heading for each LP, and be sure to include the short descriptors for each LP. These descriptors are everything—they explain what the LP means and the context for how it is applied.
Think of at least one good example of a time when you exhibited the behavior described for each principle. Don’t use the same situation/example over and over again… more is more. Writing down your answers will force you to recall good examples and capture the details. Write out your examples and bring the document to the interview.
Don’t worry, it is more than acceptable to have detailed notes in front of you for the interview. It demonstrates that you are serious and prepared.
An Amazon interviewer has been trained to conduct interviews using behavioral interviewing techniques—a method based on a candidate’s past work experience. Behavioral interviewing is a far more reliable way to predict future performance than asking candidates what they “would” do in certain situations.
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