Amazon’s Hiring Process: Why It's So Rigorous

This article is an excerpt from the Shortform book guide to "Working Backwards" by Colin Bryar and Bill Carr. Shortform has the world's best summaries and analyses of books you should be reading.

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How does Amazon’s hiring process work? Why does it approach hiring the way it does?

Amazon’s hiring process involves many interviews with a diverse set of employees. Understanding how Amazon hires new employees is helpful both for potential applicants and for other companies looking to improve their processes.

Keep reading to learn how and why Amazon hires the way that it does.

Amazon’s Rigorous Hiring Process

Amazon’s hiring process is uniquely rigorous. Amazon strives to perfect its hiring process because of another one of its guiding principles: Only hire applicants with the potential to be better than the existing team.

Hiring top talent is important because the quality of new hires determines your organization’s culture. As your company grows, new hires will quickly outnumber veteran team members and make up the vast majority of the team. If your lenient hiring process leads to new hires with low standards for their work, it can create a permanent culture of low standards across the organization.

(Shortform note: In No Rules Rules, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings takes this idea further, arguing that managers should not only exclusively hire employees with the highest standards on the market, but also fire employees who let their work slip below the organization’s standards. An organization’s culture is determined by the standards held by the majority of employees. If everyone on the team performs at an elite level, each employee will be motivated to do their best and excited to work with such talented coworkers. According to Hastings, if all new hires understand that they might be fired for poor performance and that this is nothing to be ashamed of, you can make this high turnover relatively painless.)

In this article, we’ll first explore what makes Amazon’s interview process unconventional; then, we’ll take a look at the company’s unique tactic of appointing a special team of elite interviewers with the power to veto any hire.

Amazon’s Interview Process

Amazon has crafted a unique hiring process that can consistently identify the most talented applicants: First, each applicant is separately interviewed by many Amazon employees—typically five to seven. Each interviewer submits their written judgment of the candidate before learning what the other interviewers think—this keeps the group from influencing one another, fostering objectivity. Finally, the interviewers meet and discuss the candidate, ideally coming to a consensus on whether to accept them (although the final decision is usually made by an experienced hiring manager).

Why Do Employers Request So Many Interviews?

Conducting five to seven interviews may seem excessively thorough, but such hiring processes are becoming more common. This is especially true in the age of remote work, as some employers assume that because online interviews are more convenient for applicants, they’re justified in requesting more interviews.

Although Amazon attempts to assign many interviewers to each applicant to maintain objectivity, some experts contend that companies do this to deflect individual responsibility. That is, if a new hire turns out to be a poor fit, no one interviewer has to take all the blame. Critics might argue that Amazon does this—when many interviewers convene to define a consensus, it could obscure who’s at “fault” for a botched hire.

With that said, the other elements of Amazon’s hiring process seem to contradict this theory. The company has written records of each interviewer’s pre-written judgment of each candidate, so a judgment that’s accurate in hindsight can be easily traced back to the interviewer who made it. Additionally, since each decision is made by a single hiring manager, they implicitly take some responsibility for each hire.

Culture Protectors in the Interview Process

Another way that Amazon’s hiring process is unique involves a group of specially trained interviewers that we’ll call “Culture Protectors” (Amazon calls this group the “Bar Raisers”). Amazon selects the best interviewers to become Culture Protectors and trains them into masters by coaching them through countless interviews.

The purpose of this group is to ensure that the company doesn’t accept a single low-quality employee. At least one Culture Protector interviews every new employee, and they have the power to reject any applicant, even if the hiring manager wants to hire them. This bias toward rejection ensures that every member of the organization is above a certain baseline of quality, even if it results in understaffing in the short term.

(Shortform note: To further protect their culture, some startups choose to give this veto power not only to a specially trained group of interviewers but also to every employee at the company (at least in the early stages of their business). This ensures that every new employee is more than a highly skilled worker—they’re someone the other team members want to work with. Additionally, new hires feel valued and motivated once they’re told that everyone in the company wanted to hire them.)

Amazon’s Hiring Process: Why It’s So Rigorous