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I’ve been at Amazon for over 3 years and have interviewed extensively. Over time, when interviewing for partner teams (that is when your colleagues ask you to be part of assessing candidates for them) I took a greater interest in Phone Screens where I got to speak to candidates at initial stages. While most Phones Screens did not go well for very predictable reasons (Amazon’s bar is quite high), I wanted to experiment with coaching some candidates who I thought had the right experience but for some reason completely bummed themselves out in an interview. So I’d offer them some general tips on what a great interview looks like, then progress them to a second Phone Screen and see how they perform with better prep. While I did not run any quant analysis, I would often follow up with recruiters to enquire about the “fate” of these candidates. To my excitement, some made it into live loops and got offers. The reason why I found this exciting is because in 9 cases out of 10 they would have been rejected at Phone Screen due to lack of prep, being uncomfortable with the interview format, etc. This would be the dreaded false-negative that Amazon is quick to take. So I decided to pull together my top tips and advice from a perspective of an experienced Amazon interviewer. My intention here is not to help you pass the interview no matter what, but to help you remove obstacles that may obscure your talent. I am a huge believer in Amazon’s hiring process, but I also think that we could probably do more to make candidates more comfortable with how we hire. So I’m trying to plug a gap here, in a rather awkward way. Hopefully, folks here will find it useful. Whichever role you are interviewing for at Amazon (tech, non-tech, semi-tech), you’ll have to pass competency-based interviews. This style of candidate assessment is not unique to Amazon (a whole bunch of Fortune 500 companies and consulting houses practice them, P&G and McKinsey are just two examples). However, Amazon relies on this format almost exclusively to establish your organisational fit - that is, everything over and above your technical skills. Another peculiarity is that Amazon is superbly precious about the competency-based part of the assessment, and would rarely compromise on a candidate who smashes a technical bar (if there is one for the role) but bombs the competency-based assessment. So getting through competency-based interview rounds is essential, and investing time into preparing for them is not only common sense, but is actually recommended by Amazon recruiters themselves (just read through amazon.jobs content and pay attention). So what does a competency interview look like? Rather than doing a simple/classic CV dig, interviewers will be asking you to tell them about a situation from your professional life that demonstrate the kind of behaviours that Amazon is looking for in candidates. The interview questions will sound something like “Tell me about a time when you refused to accept a situation as it was”. The interviewee tells the story and then answers follow=up questions. Why does Amazon use competency-based interviewing? Amazon is a data-driven business, by their own admission. Apparently, they saw evidence suggesting that this method of interviewing is the most effective to assess whether a candidate will be successful in the business. The general premise (and promise) of competency-based interviewing is that past behaviour predicts future performance. Which is why the story-telling format of a competency-based interview allows Amazon to establish whether the candidate has, in fact, demonstrated the required behaviours in the past or not. Note - technically speaking, the world of HR and Social Science do not agree on which type of interviewing is the most predictive of org fit and candidate’s success in the business. So every business picks their own dojo - some do it intuitively, some look for evidence. Amazon decided to stick to competency interviewing, and this format is not going away any time soon. What behaviours does Amazon look for when they interview? Amazon looks for behaviours that correspond to Amazon’s business management mantra - the 14 Leadership Principles (or LPs). What are Leadership Principles? 14 Leadership Principles are the DNA of Amazon, the articles of faith, the constitution and, predictably, the frequent ornamentation on the wall. Once you join the business, you’ll start speaking in LPs in 6 months. You’ll be asking your partner to “Disagree and Commit” with you on picking the style for a new couch. You’ll be encouraging your children to Dive Deep into their homework while admonishing them for lack of “Ownership”. You get the idea. You can find all the info you need about Amazon’s 14 LPs online - on their own career website, on YouTube, on Quora and everywhere in between. How will Amazon assess my performance against 14 LPs? Every interview question will be “testing” at least one LP. Which is why if you research the net well enough, you can collect the most frequently asked LP questions and literally map them against each LP. How should I respond to interview questions? You should respond with a 4-5 min story that answers the question. The story should be structured in a STAR (or SOAR) format: Situation, Task (or Obstacle), Actions, Results. Then you should invite the interviewer to drill down for more details and be ready to provide them. You should also ensure that all situations end with measurable outcomes. These can be both quantitative and or qualitative - regardless, you should be able to explain how you knew that you succeeded or failed. Be sure to avoid long monologues. You know you are doing well when an interview feels like a conversation. You should be brief and to the point enough to avoid unnecessary and unrelated details, but offer enough to the interviewer to demonstrate that the story is real, and that you have an eye for detail. How will Amazon assess the quality of my responses? Your responses will be evaluated against the bar for the level of the role that you applied for. An interviewer will vote to hire you if they are convinced that the behaviours that you demonstrated during the interview put you above 50% of current Amazonians at that level and in the same job family. It’s a high-judgment decision (I.e. no quantitative data), which is why you will have 5-6 people interviewing you. What are the useful characteristics to demonstrate? Even though we assess you against LPs, it’s helpful when you are: calm, composed and relax, brief and not “loopy”, confident but not arrogant, genuine, engaged and excited about meeting Amazonians, and equally as exited to share your achievements during the interview. What are the top tips to help prepare for LP-based interviews? 1. Go beyond superficial sources and try to dig up information about Amazon’s Leadership Principles that would give you an idea WHY they are what they are. You can do this by reading “The Everything Store”, by watching YouTube interviews and lectures of Amazon’s S-team (Jeff B and Jeff Wilke are awesome - I’d go as far as to say that Jeff Wilke is my favourite). The more you understand what lies underneath LPs, the more you will be comfortable in unexpected situations (I.e. when your interviewer decides to improv and asks you a question that you’re not prepared for). 2. Research the most frequently asked questions and map them against LPs. 3. Prepare 2-3 stories about situations from your professional life that best demonstrate behaviours mentioned in each question. Prepare a cheat sheet with a table listing all LPs and story prompts against each LP. Be sure to have a column with Key Results and another for Lessons Learned - you’ll need them later. 4. Note - you can re-use stories if you think that they can work for more than one LP, but avoid doing it more than twice. 5. For recent grads - your extra curricular activities, not your class work, is your treasure chest. Lean into that part of your academics for stories and situations (we’ve seen your resume, your transcripts and your grades - whatever you shared with us). 6. Aim for 4-5 minutes for an opening story, then invite drill-downs. If you join Amazon, you will need to be comfortable with being under constant scrutiny. Demonstrating this quality in an interview is helpful. 7. You don’t have to be Jeff Bezos in order to have stories that will qualify for a decent answer. I’ve interviewed seasoned pros as well as recent grads, and trust me - if you have what Amazon is looking for, you will be able to produce situations that bring the behaviours to life. No need to save the world and fly to Mars (not yet at least!). 8. Always make sure that you have outcomes and results for every situation, These would have to be real. If you don’t have results that you can measure, how would you know if you were successful? 9. Be ready to tell the interviewer what you’d do differently if you were in a similar situation again. Even if the story that you told was a success. Amazon believes that there are lessons learned in EVERY situation (I also believe that this is true). Knowing what these are demonstrates that you are reasonably self-critical, down-to-earth and realistic (according to Amazon’s beliefs, of course. 10. Be ready for improv questions. In 9 cases out of 10 your questions will be drawn from the same interview bank. But we can always improvise if we want to. The way to be ready for this curve ball is to really research and understand Amazon. 11. Generally, the more senior the level, the more autonomy, org impact, complexity of problems solved and seniority of audience we expect to see. Be prepared for situations where, based on your answers, you will be made an offer but at a lower level. This is a good outcome, but just means that the situations that you provided do not quite hit the bar for the level that you’ve applied for. My final and probably the most important tip: PRACTICE. The more you can de-sensitize yourself to the interview format the more in the zone you will feel during the actual interview. Don’t take it from me, but take it from the Navy SEALs who spend most of their time preparing for ops. Interviewing is the same - the more you practice, the better you will perform. When I was a candidate, I spend 3 months interviewing around before I found myself in an Amazon loop. I was EXTREMELY lucky that I was very familiar with the competency interview format and had a chance to practice it in multiple interview panels before I interviewed with Amazon. This, coupled with in-depth research about the business, helped me be at my best during the loop and land the job. If you know someone who is interviewing with Amazon, link up with them and interview each other. Then give each other feedback on how well you did. I’ve set up an Interview Buddies channel on Discord - feel free to join and link up with others looking for mock interviews: https://dayone.careers/p/discord If you don’t know anyone who’s interviewing, get your friends to do it for you. If you’d like to be interviewed by someone who has been an interviewer at Amazon, feel free to DM me and we can arrange a full mock interview (for a fee) - book here: https://calendly.com/dayonecareers/1-1-mock-interview . Or do what I did and schedule many “burner” interviews to run in-field practice. I hope this gives you good start with your prep. If you have any questions, feel free to post them here or DM. Your Amazon Alum/d1_coach FAQ Are you just hiring the same people as you are? Yes and no. When a business interviews for a position, it has an idea of what qualities and competencies they are looking for in candidates. And if this set of requirements is more or less similar for everyone, then at some level businesses WILL be looking for people similar to those who are already employed and are successful. I don’t think this is a bad thing per se. Organisations are sub-cultures, and are by definition selective. Any social group is. To me, the real question is not whether a business is trying to hire the same people as are currently employed, but where the balance between conformity and diversity lies. I personally believe that Amazon (and other businesses that follow a similar model) have got this right. We’re looking for folks who demonstrate similar competencies that can be evidenced through behaviours. This is all the conformity that we need. Everything else is open to variation. And I have to say - just interacting with the folks in our London office makes me feel great about it. #hrissues #amazon #interview #lps #career
Thanks for this. But have to ask TC?
Human kindness can’t price that
Never enough :))
cheat sheet
I don’t mind rehearsed - as long as the situations and the behaviours are real (we can figure our fake pretty easily). We also drill down in multiple directions, ask for details, results, etc. Prep helps folks be more flexible and less rigid in an interview setting, and rehearsing some basic stories only helps.
You’re realizing it just now? It’s called preparing for interviews. You can only prepare for a limited number of scenarios - you can always get thrown a curveball in the interview or just not have faced a situation like what’s being asked for. Additionally interviewers will probe your story and figure out what exactly you did in each situation so it’s not easy to BS.
Thank you, very nice of u for complete details!!
This is great! I’m preparing for my online assessment currently.
is this for new grad?
No, from what I understand it’s a SDE II / L5 position.
Thanks but all these to get pip’d in 6 months tho. We’d appreciate if you can drop tips on how to avoid getting pip’d.
This whole 14 LP is a total garbage. The only thing it is measuring is how much you want the job; Will you go ahead and agree to some non sense if Amazon says it’s not.
Wrong ... this is the reason most people can’t get high level position (like L6 or L7), just by hacking Leetcode and getting lucky on design interview. You really need to have solid track record of achieving things for that level besides technical competency.
Added a Discord channel for people looking for interview buddies - see body of the article.
I see discord
Your sight did not fail you. What was Slack one day has since morphed into Discord :))
Are you able to do L7 level SDM mock interview?
Yes, with a caveat that I’d have to interview you as a non-tech senior manager (L7) and assess you against general level guidelines. I don’t do tech mocks, but I’m pretty sure there are plenty of folks here who can offer you a tech L7 mock.
Thank you!