How Do You Get Hired at AWS?

As a Principal Business Development Manager at AWS, I get a fair number of questions about how we hire people. How does one get their résumé noticed? What is a phone screen? How do in-person interviews work? What are the Leadership Principles and what role do they play? How should a candidate prepare for an interview?

It's true that we have a unique approach to hiring, but it's straightforward once you're familiar with a bit of Amazon-specific culture and terminology.

Though I work at AWS, in this article I'm not writing on behalf of AWS or Amazon. The opinions expressed here are my own.

Leadership Principles and Raising the Bar

It starts with our Leadership Principles. If you're not used to working someplace that has its own comparable set of guiding principles—or worse, someplace that does, but only gives lip service to them—then they may seem forced or inauthentic on first reading. Trust me: they're genuine. I can honestly say that in my 18 months at AWS, in every day on the job, I've heard them used—and often used them myself—organically, in describing our approach to development, to sales, to marketing, and most of all to how we treat our customers.

We're looking for people who raise the bar. What does that mean? It means that—in order to hire someone—we have to believe that they will, once on the job, perform better than half or more of people already working for us in that same role. The idea is that we want to improve our performance as an organization over time.

In fact, we're so committed to raising the bar that we have an internal group of specially selected and trained employees known as Bar Raisers who help facilitate this. Every in-person interview includes a Bar Raiser who isn't associated with the hiring team, to provide an independent opinion of the candidate's ability to improve AWS as a whole.

Read through the LPs (as we refer to them) and ask yourself if an organization that truly believes in those ideals is the kind of place you'd want to work. Ask yourself if—based on what you know—you think you would raise the bar at AWS. If your answer to both the questions is yes, then I hope you consider applying.

As our Chief Evangelist, Jeff Barr, put it to his daughter when she was preparing for her own interview at AWS:

You need to be sure you can express yourself in terms of the Leadership Principles. If they resonate with you, and if you can express yourself in those terms, you're probably going to have a pretty good day of interviews here.

Applying to AWS

If you've decided to apply, that's your next step. You may have applied to or worked for organizations where people are hired via personal connections, and where résumés from people without such connections are typically discarded. This isn't the case at AWS. We're constantly hiring, and we have to look at many candidates to find the right person to hire for any given role. It would be self-defeating to toss out a résumé from someone simply because we don't yet know them. So we don't do that, and I'm proof: I applied without a referral, and was invited to move forward in the process. (In fact, I originally applied about a year earlier to a different part of Amazon, with a referral, and didn't make it past the phone screen stage. So you never know.)

That said, our own employees are our best source of candidates. If you know someone at AWS, and you think they know you well enough to recommend you, feel free to ask them for a referral. If they think highly of you, they'll be delighted to assist you—and yes, a referral helps in the hiring process. But again, don't think it's the only way in.

As for your résumé itself, my advice is simple. Be honest and accurate. Be concise; two pages is always enough to convey the highlights of a career. Where possible, provide data points, but also be sure your data makes sense. Check your spelling. Review your work with someone who's an excellent writer. Take your time.

We write a lot at AWS, so we look for people who write well, who make the time and effort to get it right. Don't take it from me; take it from Jeff Bezos:

We don't do PowerPoint (or any other slide-oriented) presentations at Amazon. Instead, we write narratively structured six-page memos. We silently read one at the beginning of each meeting in a kind of "study hall." Not surprisingly, the quality of these memos varies widely. Some have the clarity of angels singing. They are brilliant and thoughtful and set up the meeting for high-quality discussion. Sometimes they come in at the other end of the spectrum...

Here’s what we've figured out. Often, when a memo isn't great, it's not the writer's inability to recognize the high standard, but instead a wrong expectation on scope: they mistakenly believe a high-standards, six-page memo can be written in one or two days or even a few hours, when really it might take a week or more! ... The great memos are written and re-written, shared with colleagues who are asked to improve the work, set aside for a couple of days, and then edited again with a fresh mind. They simply can't be done in a day or two.

The Phone Screen

If the hiring manager is interested in you, the next step will typically be a phone screen with them: a call in which they determine whether or not to recommend that you move forward, either with an additional phone screen (we sometimes like to have multiple points of view at this stage) or with an in-person interview.

You'll first want to review our official materials on preparing for your phone screen.

If you're the type to rigorously plan and prepare for big events, feel free to prepare for your phone screen as you would for an in-person interview, as described below. But at a minimum—and I can't stress this enough—ensure you're familiar with AWS.

Imagine that you're interviewing a candidate for your current employer. You'd want them to show enough interest in your organization to know it, to have opinions about it. Imagine the questions you'd ask them to determine whether they were familiar with your firm, either from having worked directly with it, researched it, or both. Imagine the questions you'd ask to determine whether the person had thoughtful opinions about your firm, both its present state and its future prospects. Now ask yourself those questions about AWS. Can you answer them?

Three Things to Know About In-Person Interviews

Before you participate in an in-person interview, you're going to want to prepare. There are three things to keep in mind.

Interviews and LPs

First, we use the LPs to guide our interviews. For each position, we identify the LPs that are most important for that role, and we use our time with you to evaluate how well we think you'd exemplify them within AWS. You won't know which particular LPs are most important to a specific job, so you have to prepare for all of them.

Behavioral Interviewing

Second, many of our questions will more or less follow the form, "Tell me about a time when..." We find that the best predictor of how well someone will practice the LPs at AWS is how well they practiced them at previous employers. We don't ask brain-teasers like, "Why are manhole covers round?" because we've found they're not good predictors of performance here. And never say never, but you're unlikely to be asked many of the typical interview questions like, "What is your greatest weakness?" We don't have time for them. We're too busy asking questions that we believe are likely to tell us what we need to know about you.

The STAR Format

Third, we appreciate it when candidates give answers to questions in the "STAR" format: situation, task, action, result. What was the problem you faced? What did you need to do to resolve it? How did you go about doing so? What was the end result? You don't have to use this format, but it's a convenient way of helping you structure responses that are inherently concise and informative.

Preparing for Your Interview

If you take all this together, what does it mean for your preparation? It's straightforward, but time-consuming—preparing thoroughly for an AWS in-person interview is a fair amount of work.

Start by reviewing our published advice for in-person interviews. You'll also find good information on our Day One blog, including articles on what we look for in new hires and how to talk about your work history during an interview. Take a look at our hiring FAQs.

Remember that we may try to determine your fluency with any of the 14 LPs, so you need to be ready for all of them. For each LP, imagine that you're an interviewer, and you've been asked to determine whether a candidate has exhibited the ideals of that LP in past jobs. Come up with some questions you would ask to be able to form an opinion. How many? You could do just one. For my interview, I made up about four questions per LP, but I was obsessive about my preparation. I was okay with not being hired; I just wanted to walk away able to say, "I prepared as well as I could and gave it everything I had."

For each of your questions, write down how you yourself would answer it. You could write this out as prose, but you may not be able to remember so much text. An outline structure works well: situation, task, action, and result for each question. Be honest and forthright, and keep in mind that we don't mind hearing about your mistakes—just the opposite, in fact, so long as you learn from them.

(During my interview, I was asked a question about a particular type of difficult situation. I had come up with a similar question during my preparation, and so I felt well-prepared for it. I gave my STAR-format answer, and then the interviewer asked, "Do you think you made the right decision?" I answered honestly: "I'll never know. I got the outcome I wanted, but I might have gotten a better result by handling it differently." That answer didn't show weakness or indecisiveness; it showed self-awareness. Don't be afraid to give an answer that shows that you're reflective and self-critical.)

When we interview candidates, each interviewer has a limited amount of time with them, never more than an hour. We have functional qualifications we want to determine and LPs we want to investigate. We want to dive deep on answers to be sure we're getting to the heart of each of them. The result is that we appreciate concise responses to our questions. My advice is to look at your outlined answer, then speak it aloud as you would in an interview and time yourself doing so. It's easier than you think to run on. Two minutes is about as long as you ever want to take giving an initial answer to a question, and it's best to aim for less than that.

But Why?

This may seem like a lot of work. I'll be honest. It is.

(How much work, you might ask? Personally, between preparing for both my phone screen and my in-person interview, I spent about 40 hours in total. My guess is that this is on the high side, but as noted above, I obsessed over my preparation.)

So why go through it? Why spend so much time preparing to interview at AWS? I'll address that in a future article.

Update

I've since posted a follow-on article, "Why Apply for a Job at AWS?". It's not about the mechanics of interviewing, but rather the opinion of one person—me—about some of the attributes of AWS that make it such a great place to work.