How Amazon’s Unique Hiring Process Helped It Scale to 1.6m Employees Globally
How Amazon’s Unique Hiring Process Helped It Scale to 1.6m Employees Globally
Case Study: Amazon’s Unique Bar Raiser Process
I write a bi-weekly column on leadership, management, and the future of work. In each case, I’ll tackle the questions on the minds of first-time managers, experienced managers, and even executives. I’ll leverage my own experience as a tech leader as well as my network to answer these questions in the most comprehensive, actionable, and accessible way.
In 2007, Amazon employed 17,000. By 2021 that number would grow to 1.6m employees worldwide, representing a staggering 9,000% growth rate.
There are few companies in history that have grown faster for longer or across more disparate industries than Amazon, which now includes everything from Cloud Computing and Artificial Intelligence to Logistics and Groceries.
Given this extreme level of growth, they had to develop a unique hiring process that could meet their hiring targets without sacrificing the quality of candidates.
While few companies will ever have to hire at the pace of Amazon, there are a lot of lessons to be drawn from their process that can be applied whether you’re hiring 2 people or 2,000.
On the surface, their process will look familiar to many other companies and even leverages many of the same terms (e.g. Resume Review, Phone Screen). However, the way each step is managed and comes together is what makes it so unique.
Before we dive in, I wanted to give special thanks to a number of current Amazonians who helped give me an inside look at the company and how this process works. I also relied heavily on a great book called “Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon” by Bill Carr and Colin Bryan. If you’re interested in how Amazon has become so successful, I highly recommend it.
The Bar Raiser
The most important and unique aspect of their process is what’s internally referred to as the “Bar Raiser” program. It’s both the name of a larger process as well as a group of individuals, known as the “Bar Raisers”.
The Bar Raiser program was built in response to the many problems they started to encounter at Amazon as they scaled, including:
Culture: Originally, Jeff would meet with every interviewee to ensure they strengthened the company’s culture, but this quickly became unmanageable.
Consistency: As the company grew, it was difficult to even rely on the existing leadership team given the pace. They were in a position where new people were hiring new people, with little to no baseline of what a great hire at Amazon looked like.
Speed: There was intense pressure to meet hiring goals, because if you didn’t meet those goals you were at risk of missing out on your commitments for the year.
Given the pace of hiring showed no sign of abating, the team took a typically Amazonian approach to solving it: they built a new system to fix it.
While some have attributed this innovation to Jeff Bezos, it emerged internally from the early leadership team and sought to codify a systemic way of hiring top talent that matched Amazon’s culture.
The Bar Raisers are a group of cross-functional leaders who are steeped in Amazon’s culture and have demonstrated a consistent track record of hiring successfully at the company. What’s more, all Bar Raisers receive special interview training and are even identified in Amazon’s internal employee directory.
It was named “Bar Raiser” given it was intended to signal to all existing employees that they should be looking to hire employees that raised the bar relative to the existing team. In other words, the average talent level should rise with each new hire.
The Bar Raiser, who can’t be the Recruiter or Hiring Manager, plays a critical role in the hiring process at Amazon:
A Bar Raiser participates in every “hiring loop” (see more on Hiring Loop below)
The Bar Raiser has the power to veto any hire and override the Hiring Manager
The Bar Raiser is not penalized if the role is left unfilled and therefore is not subject to the same urgency bias that Hiring Managers often are
While this program was launched 21 years ago, it has stood the test of time at Amazon and remains one of the most important and successful internal initiatives in the company’s history.
There are now hundreds of Bar Raisers across the company, but some of the original cohort of 20 still work at the company to this day.
The Job Description
Amazon is a very memo-driven culture, so much so that Jeff Bezos famously banned PowerPoint in his meetings. It’s perhaps unsurprising then that they place a particular emphasis on getting the job description (JD) right in their process.
“It is difficult, if not impossible, to make the right hire without creating a well-defined and clearly written job description, which interviewers use to evaluate the candidates.”
~ Bill Carr and Colin Bryan, “Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon”
At Amazon, it’s the role of the Hiring Manager to write the job description and Bar Raisers can be used in order to evaluate the quality and consistency of it.
While every role must include Amazon’s Leadership Principles as standard, the majority of the JD will consist of role-specific requirements.
When hiring for a new role, the members of the interview loop will often meet with the hiring manager and Bar Raiser in order to review the JD and ensure that it faithfully captures the requirements of the role.
“We have participated in many hiring debriefs in which a poorly written job description created a conflict between the interviewers, who were looking for one set of skills, and the hiring manager, who was expecting something different.”
~ Bill Carr and Colin Bryan, “Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon”
Resume Review
From this point, the Recruiter will go through the resumes that have been submitted (sometimes together with the Hiring Manager). They will shortlist the resumes that most closely match the requirements as set out in the JD.
This is one of the key feedback loops in the process for the Recruiter and Hiring Manager. If the candidates that are being shortlisted don't meet the requirements of the Hiring Manager then it’s likely that JD is not clear enough.
Phone Screen
Once enough candidates have been shortlisted from the pool of candidates, the Hiring Manager will conduct a 1-hour interview with each person.
The Hiring Manager has several objectives for the Phone Screen:
Outline the role to the candidate so they can answer any questions
Build rapport by describing their own background and why they joined Amazon
Question the candidate to understand past behaviours, paying special attention to questions related to Amazon’s Leadership Principles
Provide at least 15 minutes to answer any questions the candidate might have
At this point, the Hiring Manager makes a decision on whether they are “inclined” to hire. If they are, they will be invited to an in-house interview loop.
It’s worth noting that Amazon tracks the number of applications, how many are shortlisted, and at this point how many go from the Phone Screen to the In-House Interview Loop. They leverage this data to better understand the candidate experience, but most importantly to make improvements and to improve training.
In-House Interview Loop
From here, the Hiring Manager will design what’s known as the “interview loop”. This is a long and time-consuming process that requires the time of many other Amazonians, so it’s not taken lightly.
They will decide how many people need to participate in the loop and what sorts of backgrounds should be represented (e.g. Sales, Engineering, Leadership). In most cases, the interview loop will contain no more than 5 to 7 interviewers. This group will always include the recruiter, the hiring manager, and a Bar Raiser.
Importantly, there are a few important qualifications that are required to participate in a loop:
You must have completed training in Amazon’s interview process. While they run a half-day session on this much of the training is actually practical. Even in the early months of joining you are encouraged to shadow both screening calls as well as interview loops.
The loop participants should be no more than one level below the candidate they are interviewing nor should participants interview their own boss. While there’s often pressure to include team members in the process of choosing a boss, this is highly discouraged at Amazon given all the potential drawbacks.
Once the hiring manager has designed the loop the process now relies heavily on two important elements:
Behaviour Interviewing
Amazon learned very quickly in their hiring journey what many other companies have come to understand. Namely, the basic details of your past employment and qualifications are often very poor predictors of your future abilities.
As a result, Amazon focuses much of the process on understanding how your past behaviours and ways of working map to the Amazon Leadership Principles. While they assess job-specific skills in a very standard way (e.g. Engineers would show how they would solve a technical challenge), they leverage behavioural interviewing to answer the more fundamental question of whether this candidate will thrive long-term at Amazon.
In each case, the interview loop members are assigned one or more of the leadership principles and will then ask questions based on them. There’s actually an internal tool at Amazon with a bank of questions (5-7 questions for each leadership principle) that loop participants pull from, so almost every interview at Amazon globally relies on the same basic set of foundational questions.
The goal here is for the interview loop to understand what specifically the candidate contributed and how they went about doing it. Critically, generalised answers are not accepted and each interview loop member is trained to dig deeper to understand the detail behind your answers. To do this effectively and at scale, the company relies on the “STAR” (Situation, Task, Action, Result) method:
What was the situation?
What were you tasked with?
What actions did you take?
What was the result?
As part of Amazon’s interview training, the interviewer will continue to ask follow-up questions until they feel they have a good understanding of their answer.
The Bar Raiser
As described above, the Bar Raiser plays a critical and very involved role in the process. They are involved in every interview loop and ensure that each step of the process is being followed.
Interestingly, there’s no additional pay or bonus for being a Bar Raiser. In fact, the only recognition you get is a little icon next to your name in the company directory. However, it’s a coveted and highly prestigious role internally.
Written Feedback
Consistent with Amazon’s emphasis on a writing culture, there’s a significant expectation to capture and categorize everything that transpires (almost verbatim) in each interview. The initial notes form the basis of the written feedback you’ll submit after the interview is completed.
As per the Bar Raiser process, if you don’t take detailed notes then this is one of the situations where they will step in and course correct.
Many Amazonians will actually book 15 minutes after the interview to ensure they faithfully capture everything and nothing is forgotten. The feedback should be so clear in written form that the author need not be even present. There is no flexibility here and oral feedback is not considered a substitute.
Each write-up includes their interviewer's recommendation, which only falls into one of four categories
Strongly inclined to hire
Inclined to hire
Not inclined to hire
Strongly not inclined to hire
There is no option for “undecided” and to avoid bias the interviewer is not able to see the interview notes from the other members of the loop before their own feedback has been submitted.
Debrief/Hiring Meeting
Once all the interviews have been completed and the feedback has been submitted, the hiring loop meets either in person or via video to go over everything.
The meeting is led by the Bar Raiser and the meeting starts with everyone reading through all of the submitted feedback. Critically, once everyone has reviewed and discussed the feedback you have the option as an interviewer to change your opinion on the candidate.
The rationale here is you now possess new information (feedback from your colleagues) that you did not have access to before you made your decision. This can either strengthen your initial decision or cause you to change it completely and either option is considered valid.
The conclusion of the meeting is when the hiring manager makes the final decision whether you move forward with the candidate or not. While the Bar Raiser has the ability to veto their decision it is extremely rare for this to happen.
At most companies, it will be the hiring manager or recruiter who leads the debrief meeting (if they have one at all). At Amazon, it’s the Bar Raiser who leads it. It can be quite uncomfortable for new Amazonians to go through this process where they don’t run the meeting (or they feel the need to sell their candidate to the rest of the loop). The purpose of having the Bar Raiser lead the meeting is to bring an objective approach to the process and to the evaluation of the candidate so only the very best make it through.
Reference Check
Amazon has de-emphasized the importance of reference checks in the hiring process, which is increasingly common at other companies. They took this decision because according to their data, the reference check rarely affected the final hiring decision.
However, when they do complete reference checks it’s a key part of this process and the candidate can’t be hired until it’s complete.
At Amazon, it’s the hiring manager who completes the reference checks and this typically involves asking candidates for 3-5 references who ideally include former managers, colleagues, and reports.
The two most frequent questions are:
“If given the chance, would you hire this candidate again?”
“Of the people you have managed or worked with, in what percentile would you place this candidate?”
The information gleaned from this conversation should add to the overall understanding of the candidate and should support the existing information you’ve already captured as part of the process.
Offer Through Onboarding
Once the team has decided to make an offer it’s the hiring manager that makes the offer, not the recruiter. They will personally call you to walk you through the offer and why they’re excited for you to join the team.
Amazon knows that they’re operating in a very competitive market and that candidates that are going to get to their final stages likely have many other opportunities they can pursue. For this reason, they encourage the entire interview loop team to stay engaged in the process until the candidate signs on.
The expectation is that at least someone from the team maintains weekly contact with the candidate - even if it’s just to check in - up until they formally accept the offer.
Amazon also leverages their own product to entice candidates to sign, sometimes sending “book bombs” to candidates (a collection of books the team thinks they would like) or other products offered by Amazon to demonstrate an understanding of the candidate.
The focus is to make the gesture sincere and personal and to show the candidates how much they’ve understood about them through the process before they’ve even started.
If the team encounters roadblocks at this final stage, they’re encouraged to dig deep to understand what’s preventing the candidate from signing or whether there are concerns that they’ve left unaddressed. They have the agency to enlist others at the company to help address those concerns or escalate to more senior leaders (VPs and even the CEO) to help pitch the candidate on the opportunity.
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