Amazon interviews: The worst- that’s if someone shows up
There are so many times where Amazon and their recruiters hound you for an interview schedule and once you give it to them and lock it down, 99% of the time, there is a last minute cancellation from the hiring manager or a postponement or my favorite- another role is taking priority over this one, so we no longer hiring for this role, and this is an hour after rescheduling the interview. All this is before your first interview. I have feedback to the recruiter on the hiring managers disrespect for candidates time and the amount of time spent preparing for interviews and all of a sudden, I no longer have Amazon hounding me. I guess transparency, being bold and respect are not part of Amazon’s core values after all.
I have heard from my friends at Amazon that their recruiters are worst. Also have first had experience! I think other FAANG companies are exponentially better than Amazon recruiters!
I had 2 different recruiters contacted me simultaneously for a role that requires a PhD. They didn’t even look at my profile and one of them “advised” me to look for an internship after they found out I have no PhD. I have 14 yoe
Just cause you have a PHD doesn’t mean you can do the job. Personally, I value experience over any qualification.
Personally I value neither: every individual is different: a crappy engineer can stay as crappy for the next 20y. On the other hand I have an L3 with a BS that is performing at least L5 constantly in his first year here. I also met a guy interviewing here with nothing more than a high school degree and two years spent in various startup, he is super knowledgeable for his age.
Amazon outsources some of its recruiting work. Speaking as an Amazon sde who had to recruit for his team
It’s the Amazon Managers that don’t pitch for the interviews though. How do you explain that?
Amazon’s recruiters are unprofessional and arrogant. I had to get pretty insulting to get them to finally leave me alone.
I’m sorry you had this experience. Again, who would want to work for a company that leads with these people being the first experience you have. My experience completely put me off Amazon.
Amazon recruiters have scheduled me to interview for positions I’m not qualified for and have no interest in. They don’t tell you that though until you get into the first interview and realize you’re being asked questions about a topic entirely unrelated to your expertise. Once I applied to a compliance project manager role and they interviewed me for a software dev req.
I’m hearing that the recruiters may be at fault and not the actual Interviewers who are the ones for the last minute reschedule or cancellation?
I just got done with the Amazon recruiting pipeline and signed my offer. I had a totally different experience. Start to finish, it was the best set of people I’ve ran into, compared to twitter, slack, GitHub, Uber, Microsoft, and smaller players. I hear everyone’s comments, but it doesn’t line up with what I experienced at all.
Good for you! So you have interviewed with ALL these other companies and Amazon is the best?!?! Somehow I’m finding this hard to believe. I’ll take all the over feedback over one that doesn’t line up.
Yes, I did. And yes, they were.
How did you end up in the pipeline? Makes a world of difference. There are really two groups inside of Amazon: the unicorn teams/orgs, and the meat grinder. Recruiters primarily work for the meat grinder. My hiring experience was excellent, but I went through the VIP entrance: was referred by a close friend for a very specific team, and they had a vested interest in hiring me. The SDM was driving it from behind the scenes the entire time (in fact, he actually called me personally on several occasions with updates), and the recruiters were just there to handle interview scheduling and discuss offer details/logistics (which they're honestly pretty good at). If you're responding to random recruiters, yeah, your experience is probably going to suck. They work on behalf of an entire org and are just playing a numbers game by throwing candidates at the shittiest teams (high attrition and/or absurd growth targets). Screeners are flaking because they were often assigned to your interview event randomly and are almost always from a totally unrelated part of the org (or another org entirely) and don't really care about you or the team/req you've been assigned to, are often added with little notice and may have conflicts, may be OOTO, miss the message/calendar invite for one reason or another, and the list goes on (it's assumed you will do the interview unless you explicitly decline it).
Damn.