Appendix: Interviewing at Amazon

If you’re reading my book about Amazon’s Leadership Principles (LPs), you might want to work at Amazon. On this page, I’ll list some of my best tips on the Amazon interview process.

First Things First—Learn about Amazon’s Culture

• Read the rest of my book! (which is still a work in progress)
• Read Amazon’s guide to interviewing, especially the Leadership Principles
• Read Dave Anderson’s stuff! Dave was a Bar Raiser at Amazon and has some great tips about interviewing at Amazon including:
  • Interviewing at Amazon — Leadership Principles. This is the most important one. It breaks down and explains the different leadership principles that you need for an interview. If you don’t want to sign up on his website, you can find an older version here.
  • What to Expect from the Amazon Interview and Hiring Process. An overview of the process
  • How to Pass the Amazon Behavioral / Leadership Principles Interview. The basics of how to answer behavioral questions.
  • How to pass the Amazon Technical / Functional Interview. How to answer the technical questions.⁽¹⁾Gayle Laakman McDowell (www.gayle.com!) has some great books on technical interviews including: Cracking the Coding Interview and Cracking the PM Interview.
• Jeff Bezos IS Amazon’s culture so it’s good to read some of his writing or watch some interviews:
  • Jeff’s most recent (and his first) letter to investors
  • Jeff at the Economic Club of Washinton DC gives a good overview of his philosophy.

My Tips on Applying the Leadership Principles

Amazon spends of lot of time on “Being Amazonian.” It checks this by asking behavioral interview questions LINK to determine how well you match these principles. Each interview starts with, “I have to apologize ahead of time. I’ll be typing during this interview to make sure I capture all of the details that you talk about.” The interviewer is assigned 2-3 LPs and will be writing down the components of your answer to see how well you match each LP and therefore Amazon’s culture. You’ll want to create a set of core stories to answer these questons.

1. First understand the LPs and Amazon’s culture (above).
2. For each Leadership Principle, brainstorm the best stories that show how well you match against the principle. These should be things that you’re proud of and you think you’ve done well.
3. Take all of those stories and create table. On the left hand side, list all of the leadership principles. On the top, list each of your stories.
4. Rank each story from 1 (low) to 5 (high) on how well it exemplifies that story.
5. Stories that show a negative example of the leadership principle should get a -∞. Note that many good Amazon stories can be altered to align with the leadership stories and would not receive this score.
6. Sum up all of the numbers for each story.
7. You’ll see that some of your stories have much higher scores than others. These become your core Amazon stories that you can tell against multiple questions. While you don’t want to keep using the same story with a single interviewer, feel free to reuse them with multiple interviewers, especially if you highlight different parts of the story.

	Story 1	Story 2	Story 3	…
Customer Obsession	4	1	5
Ownership	5		5
Invent and Simplify	3	5	-∞
…
Total	25	15	Don’t Use

It’s important to have solid Amazonian stories that highlight the leadership principles. You really need 5 or 6 strong stories that hit different multiple LPs because:

1. You want too make sure that you don’t go against any LP
2. You don’t know which LP they’ll be asking for
3. You want a robust follow up that makes sense for that specific LP

For example, I have a great story about mentorship that’s only about mentoring. However, I have a slightly less good story about mentoring that also hits Customer Obsession and Think Big, so I use that one. My best story hits eight of the LPs.

The one caveat is for earn trust. This may require it’s own story. It’s a standard story about “Tell me about a mistake you made.”

Amazon normally interviews people in two phases. The first is a phone interview where a senior member of the team takes a first pass. The second phase is an all-day interview called the “loop” and involves various different people at Amazon interviewing you.

Stress Test Your Stories

Many technologies are very secretive about their interview questions. Amazon isn’t. The questions are pretty standard and relatively easy to find online when you Google for Amazon Leadership Principles Interview Questions. Also, if you’re at a school, they likely have a list of these questions.

Look at these different questions and see how your stories match up. For a good Amazon story, you should be able to answer the question with the stories you’ve come up with. It may take a little work but ifi the story is good, you’ll be able to do it. Also note that in an interview you’ll probably want to tell the closest story that you have for the question, even if it doesn’t match up perfectly. It’s likely better than trying to come up with something on the spot.

Note on referrals: Big tech companies like Amazon and Google have thousands of resumes to go through. One heuristic that I use is internal referrals. Internal referrals have a special status. At Amazon a number of people would ask me for an informational interview just so I would give them a referral. It was much easier for me to give them the referral without spending the half hour talking to them. So I eventually started saying, “I’m happy to refer you. Once you’re selected for the interview, we can have the informational interview.”