Amazon's Current Employees Raise the Bar for New Hires

&quot;With a word, they can veto any candidate, even if their expertise is in an area that has nothing to do with the prospective employee&#x27;s.&quot;<p>Ah good, giving some extreme power to someone otherwise completely un-involved in the hiring process. Why should Rachel in accounting get to veto Sara as an engineer?<p>&quot;Sailesh Rachabathuni, who developed software for Kindle devices before leaving Amazon in 2012, says he once vetoed a candidate for a programming job because the candidate didn&#x27;t know much about a specific programming language, a detail others missed.&quot;<p>Great! A game of software trivia! Could be relevant, could just be this person being a douche, hard to say.

I&#x27;ve worked at Amazon, both in the warehouse management division as well as AWS, and the whole &quot;bar raiser&quot; phenomenon is mostly just marketing fluff. There are a handful of engineers who don&#x27;t mind interviewing (or at least hate it less than most), and they get picked often to be part of the interview circuit. After some number of interviews, you are considered one of the mystical &quot;bar raisers&quot;. However, in my experience, they are not any different from other interviewers. More experienced sure, but the difficulty of questions is highly variable, and honestly there isn&#x27;t much culture at Amazon to worry about culture fit.

There are a lot of factual mistakes with this article.<p>(see notes at the end before flaming)<p>Amazon interviewers typically go through a long &quot;shadowing&quot; process where they calibrate their questions and evaluation criteria. You can&#x27;t just go on to interviewing candidates on your first week. Also, interviwers interview for their own &quot;job families&quot;, so e.g. SDEs and SDMs will typically interview technical roles and likewise for non-technical roles. All interviewers are also required to enter detailed &quot;feedbacks&quot; (if you&#x27;ve been put-off by the interviewer furiously typing away, please pardon them - they&#x27;re not emailing, just taking detailed notes).<p>Amazon bar-raisers go through <i>additional</i> rigorous shadowing process that typically lasts many dozen of interviews and calibrations. An Amazon BR is more like a &quot;moderator&quot; in the interview loop than an all-powerful veto-machine. Veto is a very powerful tool, to be wielded extremely sparingly. BR on a loop is an &quot;external&quot; third-party who makes sure no self-interests are in play while hiring a candidate - i.e. no team is compromising on quality just to fill open positions.<p>Also, it&#x27;s patently false that BRs ask extremely hard questions. Infact, most questions of BR focus on soft-skills and Amazon&#x27;s leadership principles (Google them, we take them very seriously!). Also, BR&#x27;s do loop within their job families and anything otherwise may happen only under extraordinary circumstances.<p>Notes: Amazon being as large it is, is comprised of thousands of autonomous groups and hence some candidate&#x27;s experience may be sub-par and might have been contrary to what I&#x27;ve written. If you had a bad experience while interviewing at Amazon, please reach out to your recruiter who&#x27;ll then forward your feedback to BRs. We take instances of bad candidate experience <i>very</i> seriously and will try to fix deficiencies if any. While recruiting, we consider the candidate as our customer and strive to make their interviewing experience delightful.<p>NB: Yes, I&#x27;m an Amazon BR. Posting using a throw-away account.

&quot;he once vetoed a candidate for a programming job because the candidate didn&#x27;t know much about a specific programming language, a detail others missed&quot;<p>He appears to be pretty proud of this. Most top companies actually care less about knowing specific languages as opposed to having the critical thinking skills they&#x27;re looking for.<p>Not sure him vetoing a candidate because of a lack of knowledge in one language was a plus for Amazon.

One fun benefit of having such a &quot;tough&quot; (low probability of hire, not necessarily difficult-question tough) hiring process is that smart people constantly get weeded out, which makes filling spots extremely tough, which means that your team is constantly understaffed. This of course means your existing staff are overworked and turnover is high, meaning you now get to try to fill even more spots.

In context, Amazon is also one of the worst performing companies in the Fortune 500 for employee retention. An average employee lasts 1 year: <a href="http://www.slate.com/blogs/business_insider/2013/07/28/turnover_rates_by_company_how_amazon_google_and_others_stack_up.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.slate.com&#x2F;blogs&#x2F;business_insider&#x2F;2013&#x2F;07&#x2F;28&#x2F;turno...</a>

In my younger days I interviewed with them twice, but every aspect of the hiring process was so protracted that I ended up accepting jobs with other companies instead. Inevitably, several days after I had started at the new company I would get a phone call from Amazon to schedule the next round of interviews.<p>This was before they were as desperate as they are today, but even then the questions were hardly brutal.<p>Here in Seattle the reputation most often associated with them is &quot;sweatshop&quot;. This isn&#x27;t universally true, of course--some teams are better than others--but just about everyone I know who works there always tells me, &quot;Thankfully I work on a good team. I wouldn&#x27;t want to be one of the guys working on XYZ, though. Those guys are chained to their desks.&quot; The people who had negative feedback about their own team didn&#x27;t work for them anymore, of course.<p>Anyway, churn and burn. Bring on the H-1Bs!

&gt; John Sullivan, a San Francisco State University management professor, said Amazon&#x27;s protracted hiring process is an important signal for applicants that Amazon is a tough place to work, with a lot of pressure.<p>A high-pressure interview, to work at a high-pressure, slightly-better-than-averagely paid job, that is then touted in the Wall Street Journal as being &quot;bar-raising&quot;?<p>No thanks. I guess Amazon is yet another company that failed <i>my</i> interview process.

I imagine using a bar raiser increases the randomness of the interview process at Amazon, as it effectively reduces the number of interviewers down to one in the veto case. Thus, more noise. However, reducing the false negative rate isn&#x27;t a high priority in most organizations, and Amazon is so desperate for employees that you often see the same person interview multiple times until they get in, so perhaps it doesn&#x27;t matter.

Some HR goon wants to tout their new revolutionary system. The only way they actually look like they get work done.

Amazon is a sweatshop, from bottom to top.<p>Source: relative who worked for Amazon and had frequent interactions with Jeff Bezos.

As a general policy, this seems fantastic. It just doesn&#x27;t sound like they&#x27;re scaling the culture carriers fast enough.<p>* Bar raisers may be asked to assess as many as 10 candidates a week, for between two and three hours each, including paperwork and meetings—all while doing their regular full-time job, be it in finance, marketing or product development.*<p>20-30 hours per week for a non-job activity? This can&#x27;t possibly be correct. Or does Amazon have a workaholic culture that supports this - 20-30 hours for those hungry after their 50-60 hour workweeks?<p>I heard a story about Google that the employees who were vetoed as candidates but hired anyways actually outperformed, because they had something about them that was so valuable that it was worth trumping the process.<p>As someone who has hired in the past, I have gotten in trouble by letting too many people have vetos. You wind up having to accommodate so many pet peeves (&quot;They don&#x27;t have 5 years of specific experience&quot;, &quot;I don&#x27;t like their school&quot;...) that it&#x27;s impossible to get good candidates.

Somewhat offtopic but I think there&#x27;s a chance someone here might be able to help.<p>I had applied through Amazon&#x27;s website for a graduate position nearly 2 months ago and according to the dashboard, my application is still under review but I have never heard from anyone. I think my application has been stuck in some limbo and is now invisible to HR. I tried looking for a relevant email so that I can follow-up but this has been impossible. Granted, I found a graduate email I had written down 1 year ago but so far haven&#x27;t had any reply and the email seems deprecated because its not advertised on the website anymore. Even on on-campus events, Amazon recruiters would give only the website address, no emails.<p>Could anyone perhaps point me to someone I could ask to have a look?<p>edit: To clarify, I am certain the application has not been rejected. I also do believe I am at least worth looking into hehe ;)

&quot;To become a bar raiser, a worker generally must have conducted dozens or hundreds of interviews, and gained a reputation for asking tough questions and identifying candidates who go on to be stars.&quot;<p>Typical interviewing scenario where P(FA)&gt;10^10 and P(Miss)=0. Such schemes create groupthink problems later on.

It sounds like the amazon hiring process takes a long time, which probably also contributes to their goal: employees who stay long term. Filtering on quality gives you little guarantee as to how long someone will stay (in fact, I wouldn&#x27;t be surprised if those attributes were reversely correlated). But a slow hiring process will definitely reduce the field to those looking for a long term commitment.

This happened to me. I got pretty far into a TPM interview and had a couple interviews with people that were so far out of my area they may as well have been working in a different company.<p>I still had fun and don&#x27;t regret not working there, but thought it was odd that somebody who interviewed me for logistics backup plans had anything to say in my hiring process.

ebay has 30k workers? no way.<p>they don&#x27;t have inventory, they don&#x27;t police listings, they don&#x27;t do support by email anymore<p>what exactly are all those 30k people doing?

By the way, Jeff Bezos owns both Amazon and the Wall Street Journal, which published this particular fluff piece.