How To Start Your Career At Amazon

We were fortunate enough to (virtually) get together with four amazing womxn of color from Amazon to give us the inside scoop about Amazon’s recruiting and interviewing process. And girl, they delivered. Here is our guide to starting your career at Amazon.

The first thing you need to know is that Amazon is all about data, data, data. The more tangible examples the better. This is the first step to impress! They want to know about you: why you’re amazing and why you’re awesome at your job.

Pro Tip: Use the job description as a guide! What are items in the job description that you have excelled in? Highlight them by focusing on key words and not buzz words.

What specifically do Amazon recruiters and hiring managers look for?

• Years of experience, past projects, milestones, and education
• Data, data, data
• Concise and to the point list of accomplishments
• What you own vs your team (since they collect data, they want to know exactly what you are responsible for)
• Scope and scalability of projects (what did you do and what was the outcome of that)
• Sharing the challenges you have solved and/or roadblocks removed (what you defined as an issue and what you did to solve it)

During the recruitment and interview process, they are coming from the mindset to make a hiring decision for Amazon first, and the team second.

Pro Tip: Interviewers will be typing away and taking notes on you during the interview to ensure they are making a data first decision in your candidacy.

Amazon’s Interview Process

1. Assessment (not every role has an assessment, some will jump straight to a phone interview)

• Measures key characteristics required for role
• Work style assessment
• Work sample simulation

2. Phone Interview

• 1–2 phone interview process; 45–60 min long
• Speak with hiring manager, teammate, or someone currently in a similar role you are interviewing for
• Call is focused on your past experiences and functional/technical skills related to role

3. Onsite interview

• Meet with 4–6 interviewers
• 45–60min; 1:1 interview sessions, currently all video conference calls
• Similar to the phone interview, will be assessing your past experiences and functional/technical skills

Amazon’s Interview style focuses on behavioral questions. Questions that start with “can you tell me about a time when…” And they want you to answer those questions using the STAR Method.

STAR is an acronym that refers to: Situation, Task, Action, Result. When answering these types of questions, first, set up the situation. Talk about the company you were at, what the situation was, and what challenges you were facing. Then, identify the task you were given; detail your assigned role. Next, speak to the actions you took to overcome that challenge. Finally, paint a complete picture of the result. Make sure to include any metrics or data to share with the interviewer.

Pro Tip: Avoid editorializing and use data in place. Instead of saying something along the lines of “we changed our app and it was great because we got a ton of positive response and the program was successful” say, “the change we made to the app was successful and I know that because we grew monthly app users by 12%!” Show that you took the time to dive deep into understanding the results.

Amazon’s Interview Style

• Behavioral questions

-Asking about past situations/challenges and how you handled them

-Leadership principles guide the discussion

-STAR method: situation, task, action, result

-Provide metrics/data

-Reference recent situations when possible

-“I” vs. “we”: Womxn are taught to be self-effacing and to not brag about ourselves. But your interview is exactly the situation you want to shine! Focus on the “I”. You can mention your team, they know you have team members. But, make sure you make it very clear what you did and how that impacted the business and the results.

• Technical questions

-Most technical roles requires you to perform coding and system design exercises

-Don’t need to know any specific programming language before interviews: The interviewers will be looking at this from a higher level. This is just to convey your thought process! It’s more about the experience and discussion you are leading. Talk about what you are thinking, don’t stand there and write code silently.

• STAR method

-Situation: Ask clarifying questions and gather requirements. There is never a moment where they’ve given you enough information from the start; clarify the situation for yourself.

-Task: Breakdown the functionality, outline the task that is required to achieve the desired state

-Action: Implement a solution aka you writing the code. Be cognizant of time here — ask the interviewer if you’re good on time

-Result: Discuss use cases or test scenarios. How does your code perform and what is it doing?

Pro Tip: Leadership and soft skills are often overlooked in technical roles. Highlight these! Ways to improve on this: know thyself, asking questions, observe and learn, practice, find community support, and give back.

Amazon has 14 leadership principles that they use daily. This isn’t some vague mission statement with nice words, they truly get used everyday, including during the recruiting process! These are not doctrine, they are guidelines. They help Amazon as business owners and leaders make better decisions for their customers.

Amazon’s 14 Leadership Principles

• Customer obsession
• Ownership
• Invent and simplify
• Are right, a lot
• Learn and be curious
• Hire and develop the best
• Insist on the highest standards
• Think big
• Bias for action
• Frugality
• Earn trust
• Dive deep
• Disagree and commit
• Deliver results

Pro Tip: There is natural tension in these as well! “Insist on the highest standards” has natural tension with “invent and simplify”. If you are always insisting your product has to be perfect, you’ll run into problems with meeting a deadline and you may have to simplify to launch. This shows there are no right and wrong answers, it’s all about balance.

What’s Next?

Visit Amazon’s Jobs to see openings across Amazon. Or, visit Team Career Pages for available opportunities. For new grads or interns, check out their Student Programs.

Watch the full recording of the webinar here on our YouTube channel.

This blog post was adapted from our webinar with Amazon’s Angel Enriquez, Sr. Mgr of Diversity Recruiting; Jahna Montague, Recruiting Manager of Advertising; Felicia Yue, Sr. Mgr of Product Mgmt in Tech for Prime Video; and Arshia Khan, Sr. Software Engineer in Music.