Getting Hired at AWS

6 minutes

The interview process at AWS can be daunting! I was very fortunate that I received some great advice when going through my interview process. Much of that I will try to distill in this blog post. 

First a word about Amazon and the hiring process. Although, the process itself is daunting, stressful, and hard work; it is designed with the candidate in mind. Now, truthfully it doesn’t feel this way when you are going through it. The process is designed to be clear and timely. I can’t tell you how many times my colleagues have told me about interviewing at other MAJOR tech firms to only be ghosted or strung along for weeks or more. It is a terrible way to encourage an employee to want to join your organization. AWS (and Amazon by extension) have very specific SLAs on responsiveness and getting offers out. In other words, you will know if you have the job, or not, very quickly. Although I am certain there are some stories from individuals where this level of professionalism was not met, they are out of the norm and certainly frowned upon here!!

I am going to give you a basic framework of the interview process. Do keep in mind that this can vary some based upon the role or the hiring manager, but this is a pretty accurate guide. First, you will likely be contacted by a recruiter. This is a very high level call, potentially screening out some individuals that aren’t a great fit. Typically the second call with be with the hiring manager. Their role is to identify if you would be a good fit for the job, so they are evaluating your functional aptitude, based on the essential functions of the job. Obviously this is an interview where you want to illustrate that your past performance maps well to the job and that you are a team player. HOWEVER, this is a big point… throughout the interview process the interviewers want to here what YOU have done; not what your team did. They want to understand your role, actions, and outcomes. The next stop along this journey may be another interview with a team member, leader, or the recruiter. In my experience, this is completely optional and may be used to thin the candidate pool further, if needed. Note: some technical roles will also have a step to interview you for technical competency. Now you move to the final and most daunting part of the process… THE LOOP! (cue the scary music)

The Loop is not something to be scared of, but IS something to prepare for. The loop typically consists of 5 interviews in one or two days with one of the interviewers being a bar raiser. (A bar raiser is someone from outside of the group you are interviewing that is a HIGHLY skilled interviewer. Their job is to see if you would raise the bar at Amazon. Are you better than the average individual we currently have in that role? They have the ability to completely veto a hire and are extremely important.). The bar raiser typically won’t identify themself, but you can usually guess who it is based on the organization they are from. Each interview is up to one hour long and follows a STAR format. Essentially you are going to be asked about a time you did something that illustrated one or more of our Leadership Principles. After your interviews are over, the team will meet to determine if they are ‘inclined’ to extend an offer, at which time the recruiter will inform you of the decision and (if successful) make you an offer.

So the obvious question is, “how do I prepare for this process?”. First lets start with some really GREAT links that helped me out tremendously:

In my experience, the best way to prepare is to deeply understand the LPs and what they mean to you (I even wrote them in my own words to better understand them). How do you read them, understand them, and illustrate them in your daily work life? If you don’t believe in the LPs, let me make the process simple on you… bow out. If you don’t connect with the LPs, you won’t do well in the interview and will not find Amazon to be the place for you. However if you do, your next step is to match LPs to experiences you have had and think through the STAR format. In my case, I did this using a spreadsheet. 

How I prepared my Loop answers.. the headers of my spreadsheet

It is very important that you put significant thought to the stories you have and how they map to LPs before the Loop. If you try to wing it, you will fail. As I said earlier, it is imperative that you illustrate what you did. I totally understand the tendency to share or give credit to others. This is not the time for that. You can call those people afterwards and apologize. ;-). You need to tell the interviewer what you did and what was the result of that action WITH DATA. It isn’t enough to say “I improved sales.” How much? Was it a result of this singular action? What would have been the improvement had you done nothing? A better statement would be, “Based on the actions I took, we increased our sales by 15% over our baseline during a time when we saw other teams missing their baseline growth. This resulted in an additional $1.5M in revenue to our business.” Of course, tailor this to the job you are in the mix for.

You may be asking how much time this takes. I would say on average you should plan to put in 40 hours of prep. You may be able to do it in 8 hours, some may choose to spend much more. I know this sounds daunting, but it also makes sure you are the right fit, which benefits you at AWS and ensures you are joining a team of ridiculously professional and bright individuals!

What else can I answer for you? What are your experiences interviewing for Amazon/AWS?

P.S. Having an employee referral helps greatly when trying to get the attention of a recruiter, so don’t hesitate to reach out to colleagues that now work at AWS.