The Bar Raiser Program is a scalable, repeatable, formal process for consistently making appropriate and successful hiring decisions. It is a data-driven approach to hiring, where interviewers focus on assessing each candidate’s abilities relative to their company’s leadership principles (LPs). Like all good processes, it is simple and easy to teach, doesn’t rely on scarce resources, and has a feedback loop; the more you use it, the better it gets.
A great hiring process aims to identify and hire candidates likely to achieve long-term success at the organization. Ideally, every company should only hire candidates who a) meet the technical or functional requirements and b) will thrive within the organization’s unique culture. This won’t happen by magic. Leaders must establish scalable, repeatable processes to achieve both objectives with every hire.
While many candidates may satisfy functional and technical qualifications, not all will adapt to or excel within the organization’s distinct culture and management style. Every company operates differently, and candidates successful in one environment may not necessarily succeed in another.
The Bar Raiser process emphasizes evaluating candidates for (not only) their technical skills but also their fit and alignment with the company’s distinctive Leadership Principles. At Amazon, these principles are not just posters on the wall; they define the lens through which management views decisions and the behaviors and methods of management and leadership. The most successful leaders at Amazon embrace and embody these principles in their everyday words and deeds.
The Bar Raiser process is designed to be scalable, repeatable, and formal, ensuring consistent hiring decisions across the organization. As companies grow, informal hiring practices must be revised to maintain quality, ensure consistency, and align with core values.
Amazon’s Bar Raiser Process achieves this through the following mechanisms:
This structured approach ensures hiring decisions support and reinforce the organization’s culture and principles.
The Bar Raiser process mitigates three common types of bias:
1. Personal Bias: Individuals often favor candidates with similar cultural, academic, and career experiences. This bias leads to each manager applying personal rather than company criteria to hiring decisions, which can lead to numerous problems, including weakening organizational culture.
2. Urgency Bias: The pressure to quickly fill open roles can lead to hiring candidates who appear “good enough” rather than those who genuinely meet the bar. While urgency to fill roles is understandable, lowering the bar for immediate needs often leads to longer-term issues such as high turnover or poor performance. Deliberate, high-quality hiring ultimately saves time and resources by reducing these risks.
3. Confirmation Bias: Feedback from one interviewer can unintentionally influence others, resulting in groupthink during the decision-making process. Also, interviewers seek to confirm their biases based on the resume or first impressions.
Structured interviews, independent assessments, and a defined debrief process reduce the influence of these biases, ensuring more objective and consistent hiring decisions.
Many organizations and interviewers believe hypothetical, or case questions are the best way to assess candidates. The problem with hypothetical questions is that while they will tell you how a candidate thinks and reasons, they will not tell you how a candidate behaves and leads. Furthermore, many hypothetical questions have an implied bias because there is a binary right/wrong answer from the interviewer’s point of view.
Behavioral interviews are a method to reduce bias and to focus the interviewer on evaluating leadership actions and behaviors. A properly conducted behavioral interview reveals how candidates have handled past situations, considered the best predictor of future performance. Effective behavioral questions begin with phrases such as:
For example, when assessing the principle of “ownership,” a question might be: “Tell me about a time when you identified and resolved a significant issue outside your immediate responsibilities. How did you handle it?”
Asking the right behavioral questions is a good start, but more than simply noting the candidate’s response is required. A skilled interviewer must ask a series of probing questions to obtain the information needed to understand and evaluate each example provided by the candidate. The way to do this is to use the STAR method:
1. Situation: Understand the context of the example.
2. Task: Clarify the candidate’s specific role or responsibility.
3. Action: Explore the steps taken and how they were executed.
4. Result: Evaluate the outcome and its impact.
Written Assessment
During interviews, the interviewer must take notes that capture the details of each question and answer. Notes should resemble a transcript rather than a summary. This transcript gives other interviewers in the loop an unfiltered view of each interview question and response. After the interview, the interviewer should review the notes, edit them, and ensure accuracy and completeness.
Written Assessments should include:
All interview loop participants must attend the debrief meeting (in person or online). The Bar Raiser, not the Hiring Manager or Recruiter, facilitates the debrief meeting to ensure an unbiased, data-driven discussion. The process includes:
1. Review Written Assessments: All interview assessments are reviewed to provide a complete understanding of the candidate’s performance. Everyone reads silently for 10-15 minutes before the discussion begins.
2. Re-vote: Interviewers are asked if they wish to revise their initial votes after reviewing the complete data set. Typically, many interviewers will change their votes once they have read all assessments because they only gathered one-fifth (in a loop of five interviewers) of the behavioral data related to one-fifth of the leadership principles in their interview.
3. Discussion: In most cases, the vote is split between ‘hire’ and ‘no-hire.’ The Bar Raiser facilitates discussion to arrive at a decision. This is achieved by determining whether the candidate exceeds or falls short of the performance bar for each Leadership Principle. Conclusions should be supported by examples gathered during the interviews. Listing each principle under one of two columns (meets bar and below bar) on the whiteboard is helpful. The Bar Raiser should focus the discussion on the handful of Principles without unanimous agreement on the correct column.
4. Drive a Decision: Done right, the Bar Raiser process helps the hiring manager to make the best hiring decision for their team as well as the company’s long-term interests. If the Bar Raiser is convinced that the candidate fails to meet the hiring bar, they must help the hiring manager reach the same conclusion. They may use their authority to veto the hire if all else fails.
The following are common issues encountered in the process:
1. Incomplete Assessment: One or more of the interviewer’s written assessments do not include a detailed transcript or evidence-based reasoning behind their assessment.
2. Wrong Questions: Inexperienced interviewers may ask questions that won’t yield the necessary information to assess their assigned principles.
3. Failure to use STAR: Without carefully probing, the interviewer won’t get a detailed picture of the candidate’s actions, challenges, interactions, and leadership skills related to each example cited.
4. Flawed Analysis: The interviewer arrives at the wrong conclusions based on their assessment of the candidate’s actions.
5. Missed Coverage: Lack of data on one or more Leadership Principles because an interviewer needed to cover the principles assigned to them, necessitating additional interviews.
6. Interview Again: It is a process failure if, at the end of the debrief meeting, the hiring manager says, “I think we need to interview this candidate one more time to make a decision.” The only reasons to do so are a) the hiring manager is indecisive, or b) one or more interviewers didn’t correctly discharge their duty– they failed to gather the right data on the LPs they were assigned.
The Bar Raiser addresses these issues in the debrief meeting through real-time coaching and process oversight.
When selecting Bar Raisers (BRs) for your company, you want to identify people who have the following characteristics:
a) Consistently demonstrate outstanding interviewing and hiring skills. BRs can be either managers or individual contributors. They can assess talent and attract team members with lengthy, successful careers in your company. They demonstrate strong interviewing and leadership skills.
b) They are role model leaders in your company with a track record of upholding your company’s hiring standards.
Having BRs across each company level, including execs, senior managers, managers, and individual contributors, is crucial. You will need to assess your projected hiring volume in each department for the next 12 months to determine how many Bar Raisers you need at each level to staff each interview loop without overwhelming your Bar Raisers.
The Bar Raiser is involved in the following portions of the interview process:
Job Description/ Pre-brief Meeting. The BR should review the job description (JD) for each role where they are on the interview loop. In the case of a new or non-standard job description, a 30-minute pre-brief meeting with the hiring manager, recruiter, and the other loop participants is needed before any candidate in-house interviews. The purpose of the pre-brief meeting is to make sure everyone is clear on the exact profile of the ideal candidate. This goal is accomplished by having the loop participants read the JD and address any concerns or questions to the hiring manager. For positions the company hires regularly (e.g., Software Development Engineer II), there is no need to review the JD or have a pre-brief meeting.
In-house Interview. The BR is one of the in-house interview loop participants. Typically, there are 5-7 interviewers, with one being the hiring manager, one being the Bar Raiser, and the other 3-5 being from the same or an adjacent department (depending on the nature and level of the role). A BR participates in every interview loop. They will occasionally pair up with other interviewers and perform 2 on 1 interviews for training and coaching purposes. The BR conducts their interview as any other interviewer would. You can have more than one trained BR in an interview loop, but only one of them will be designated the BR for that loop.
The Debrief Meeting. The BR (not the hiring manager or recruiter) runs the debrief meeting. They ensure the interview process is followed correctly (e.g., all panelists have completed their interview, submitted their notes before the debrief meeting, and made a clear hire/no hire vote, etc.).
The BR moderates the discussion by helping to frame and summarize the leadership principles (or functional skills) where the candidate does and does not meet the hiring criteria. They seek agreement and alignment with the interviewers on these criteria and solicit input from the various participants to prove or disprove these assessments. They do so by asking panelists to present the evidence they gathered (what questions they asked and what responses they received) that led them to their conclusions. The BR encourages discussion and debate among the loop participants to agree on whether the evidence gathered supports each assessment.
Interview and Assessment Coaching. It is commonplace for the Bar Raiser to identify and call out gaps or omissions in the quality of an interview or the assessment. For example, an interviewer tasked with the LP Right a Lot may have asked the wrong question(s) or inadequately probed on the candidate’s answer. If the BR observes this, they must call it out in the meeting and coach the interviewer. Another example is that one or more panelists may need coaching on the definition of an LP and what kind of work product examples meet the bar. Another frequent omission is an interviewer’s notes not being submitted before the debrief, insufficient detail in the notes, or not providing a decisive and clear assessment of the candidate.
Veto Power. Bar Raisers have veto power over the hiring manager for any candidate they believe does not raise the hiring bar. This essential program feature is designed to establish that Bar Raisers have more authority in the hiring process than the hiring manager. This authority enables them to prevent hiring managers from succumbing to urgency bias (they are desperate to fill their open positions) and to prevent new, inexperienced, or poorly trained managers from making bad hiring decisions. A good Bar Raiser never explicitly exercises their veto power. Instead, they are skilled at facilitating a discussion and using the Socratic method to help the hiring manager and loop participants make the right decision (hire or no hire).
Bar Raiser Core. Once your BR program is up and running, you can establish a sub-committee within the community of Bar Raisers to act as the Bar Raiser Core (BRC). The BRC members are the best and senior most BRs. They take ownership of the program, including identifying, grooming, and mentoring future Bar Raisers to replenish and grow the BR community as your organization grows. They do this by evaluating the skills and quality of interview and debrief work performed by interviewers who are not Bar Raisers. Reading their interview assessments is an excellent way to do this. Potential Bar Raisers are brought into the program as trainees and are assigned a mentor who is currently a Bar raiser. The Bar Raiser mentor teaches the trainee about the role and responsibilities (described in this document) and then shadows and reverse shadows them on a couple of interview loops. They also let the trainee lead a debrief.
As needed, the Bar Raiser Core members (they meet monthly or quarterly) make policy decisions regarding the company’s interview process. The Bar Raiser Core should be composed of leaders from multiple functions and levels in the company. HR leaders can and should be included in this group (if they are among the most talented Bar Raisers).
All interviewers (not just Bar Raisers) involved in the process should receive training to understand how to conduct interviews properly, write assessments, and effectively participate in debrief meetings.
Efficient scheduling and coordination among recruiters, hiring managers, and Bar Raisers are critical. Tracking pipeline metrics, such as time to schedule interviews and complete debriefs, helps identify and address inefficiencies.
Senior leadership buy-in is essential for the program’s success. Resistance to increased rigor or time investment may arise, particularly during the early stages of implementation. Strong leadership advocacy ensures the process remains effective and sustainable.
Yes. They can be on the same team or from another department in the company but cannot report to or be a skip-level report for the hiring manager.
The Bar Raiser should be at the same or higher level than the role level to be hired. In other words, if you are recruiting for a level 7 Senior Manager, the Bar Raiser must be level 7 or higher.
The Bar Raiser can be a manager or an individual contributor if they are at the same level or higher than the level of the open role.
The BR process is not a formula or machine that spits out the decision for the hiring manager. It is a process designed to reduce bias, focus the interviewers on the proper criteria, and maintain high standards. In most cases, the loop will be split, leading to debate and discussion moderated by the BR. The best practice is for the BR to frame and summarize the leadership principles (or functional skills) where the candidate does and does not meet the performance bar. They seek agreement and alignment with the other interviewers on these criteria and solicit input to prove or disprove these assessments. Ultimately, it comes down to a judgment on the part of the hiring manager (and the bar raiser if needed) as to whether the candidate’s strengths are compelling enough and whether the weaknesses are moderate enough to warrant a hire decision. If the hiring manager or the bar raiser is unsure, then the right decision is not to hire.
Get in touch for bulk orders, speaking events or advisory services.
© 2021 Working Backwards LLC. All rights reserved.
See our Privacy Policy and Terms of use