Career Advice from Amazon's CEO, Andy Jassy

hi everyone i'm devin banerjee editor at large for business and finance at linkedin i'm thrilled to be joined by amazon's new ceo andy jassy to learn about his career journey and get his perspective on a variety of career topics andy welcome it's great to be with you great to be with you thanks for having me let's start with the current job market there's just an enormous number of people out there ready to turn the page start a new chapter of their careers we at linkedin are calling this the great reshuffle where do you see some of the best opportunities well yeah you're right the economy is is doing quite well which is great but as we all know the economies will go through fits and starts over time and so people want to pick places that really fit with passions they have and what they want to work on and i think you want to pick a company that has some impact on the world and that is growing and whose future growth prospects are promising uh you know and where you can imagine building a long career and so you know we feel like at amazon it's it's a pretty unusual place to build a career it's an amazing place if you want to have an impact on the world and we really exist to help make customers lives easier and better every day and we relentlessly innovate to make that so and so you know a lot of people talk about missions like that but it's really hard to walk that walk and i think if you look at amazon in the first 25 27 years we've been a business we have really been inventing and changing customers lives every day in lots of different areas and we're growing at a very rapid rate so you know we recently announced that we have um 50 you know we're hiring 55 000 technical and corporate employees we also just announced we're going to add another 125 000 employees in our fulfillment center network and so these you know there are a lot of opportunities and they're across a really broad array of functions ranging from software development engineers to product managers to people in marketing to people in design to machine learning and ai practitioners to research scientists to all kinds of jobs in our fulfillment center network and across all our businesses because we're growing in our retail business and our aws business and our advertising business and our devices and alexa business and our entertainment business it's it's a it is a very early stage in the history of amazon and if you're somebody who likes to have an impact on the world i i think it's hard to find a place that's more exciting to work than amazon so we hope a lot of people who are thinking about new opportunities will think about amazon i want to ask you about job interviews you've interviewed hundreds probably thousands of job candidates through your different roles at amazon what advice would you give anyone wanting to make a great impression in a job interview it's a good question you know i think a couple of general things and then i'll maybe speak a little bit about what we look for at amazon but i think the first thing is just be yourself you know at the end of the day you want to work at a company who values you for who you are and if you fake it in the interview and get the job and then you know you end up being you know either having to continue to fake it or people don't know who you are and don't appreciate that you're not going to be happy so really be who you are and see if there's a fit you know i think the second general thing i'd say is answer the questions a lot of times when you we all sit in interviews where uh a question's asked and instead of just directly answering the question and elaborating further people will spend five ten minutes kind of you know with a warm up and then sometimes get lost and never get to the answer and so i think i would recommend always start with your answer directly from the question and then you can kind of elaborate further i think in terms of what we look for you know i think we want people who are really passionate about customers you know and trying to think about what customers care about and build experiences that they want even if it's you know you're not sure what the business model is going to be if you start with the center with the customers at the center and move backwards from there you're usually going to be able to find an experience they care about and that you know might have a business model as well i think we also like people who are inventive and creative and you can exhibit that both with respect to what you've done in the past but also in the way you answer questions especially open-ended questions we like people who are strategic and can see the big picture but who also are passionate about the details and what i've learned in my time at amazon is that all the best ideas we talk about or put on a whiteboard where the rubber meets the road is the details and it's true at every level from the senior most levels in amazon all the way um to the junior most roles you have to be good at being able to execute the details we like people who have high standards you know our customers have very high standards i think customers today with their access to information and choices appropriately have very high standards so we need people who have high standards here we like people who i would say are more missionary than mercenary and what i mean by that is we want people who care most about the mission of what the team and the company are trying to accomplish and we'll put the the goals and the mission above the goals of themselves and so mercenaries tend to prioritize themselves over the team in the military we want missionaries and then people who are humble and realize they don't know it all and i think the second that you believe you know what there is to know is the second you're really unwinding as a professional we learn so much every few months here and being open to challenge your most closely held beliefs and learning is one of the most important characteristics of long-term employees here andy let's roll back the clock to your own career path in your 20s did you have like a master plan or did you figure it out as you went along i i had the opposite of a master plan and i think as i'll share some detail you'll you'll see that it was not a uh a well thought through plan but you know i when i was thinking about my first job i had two experiences in college that shaped what i was initially thinking i worked on the business side of my school newspaper running the advertising group and that was a really interesting initial business experience and we started a a new national college magazine called class act and that was a very fun stimulating entrepreneurial experience and then i worked for three summers in between years of college at fox tv in new york helping start a morning show which still exists called good day new york and that was i loved it i loved the rush of tv and that experience largely made me want to pursue television and i'm also a very passionate sports fan and so i decided i was going to be a sportscaster and i created my resume reel i sent it to a hundred markets i you know and i only got two opportunities um and i at the end of the day i just couldn't pull the trigger on on living in in the more remote places i was going to have to live being from new york and so i took a job at abc sports as a production assistant working on their college football scoreboard show and i really like that experience and game day was fascinating but the rest of the week was was not as interesting to me at 22. and i at the end of the day i didn't have enough passion and tunnel vision for that opportunity to pay the dues that you have to pay to get the responsible jobs and all of my peers did you know and so i went back to a company that um i was referred to by one of the people i worked with at the school newspaper and it was a great product management opportunities called mbi which is a direct marketer of collectibles and continuity series and it was a really great general managerial experience that felt very entrepreneurial because you got to to start and imagine and start a lot of small businesses i did that for a bit and then i um i i left that and started my own business um and that was a great experience for a couple years and you know uh those businesses did fine but they never were going to be big businesses and when i was in college because i decided i was going to be a sportscaster i never really seriously contemplated any other professions or took enough classes to to allow myself to be qualified for some of those other opportunities so i went back to graduate school for business and i you know when i was leaving graduate school i was really probably going to start my own business again i was managing a band at the time yeah in boston and i was thinking about starting a music management um and label idea or agency and i was also considering some other tech jobs and i had not even contemplated amazon i came back from an interview in the bay area on a red eye i got in at like 6 30 in the morning and i was going to a concert in new york city i was going to drive to at noon and i um on my answering machine there was a message from a woman who saw my resume in the resume book and said that she thought that maybe i could be a fit and she had one cancellation and what was i willing to do an interview at nine and since it fit in that schedule i said okay i'll try it and i you know i really liked um the person i interviewed with i came to seattle and and loved the people i met and the mission and how customer focused um the the organization seems so i decided to join amazon and when i was coming i um they they wouldn't tell me what my what group i was going to be in what my job title was going to be what i was going to be working on but for some reason it was very important that i start in may and and you know where i was at school we had this month in between graduation our last exam when you walked through graduation which was a really fun month you hung out with your friends play golf or do whatever you're gonna do and so i i didn't do that i came to work here for a few weeks and i started in the marketing team when it was just about eight people and we split up all the jobs all the jobs were too big for each of us but we had to kind of each take a piece of it and i started working on customer retention which fit with my direct response background yeah i did that for a few weeks and then i was asked to work on what we call a swat team project to look at other categories we should think about getting into before the brand cemented as a books only brand and so i looked at music which was really like writing a business school case and that was really interesting and i went back to marketing and built out our customer relationship marketing team and then i went back to music and ran product management and there was a general manager of our music business for a while i went back to marketing and co-ran marketing so you can see this is not you know well opposite of a master plan this is the opposite of a master plan and i did that for about a year korean marketing for a year and then i got offered this incredible opportunity unlike anything i'd done before or since to be what they then call the executive shadow for jeff bezos it was really like a chief of staff role where we spent all our time together and uh um even including in his one-on-ones which didn't make them one-on-one anymore and uh and then we would debrief each week on what we heard and what was important to follow up on and try to divide and conquer uh how to do so and you know for him it was a way to extend his bandwidth for me it was just an incredible opportunity to see a lot of parts of the business i didn't get to see when i was in management jobs that were more functional and so i did that for about 18 months and coming out of that job you know i left to kind of explore an opportunity that we thought you know might be interested in building a technology infrastructure platform that might allow our internal consumer business to move more quickly but we figured if if it would work for our internal team which is highly technical yeah it might be something interesting for third parties as well and so that became really the vision document that we wrote that became aws and i managed that the last 18 years before doing this job so that is kind of the opposite of a master plan but i think the one you know some of the common pieces are i think you know my wife gave me a really good piece of advice career advice when i was leaving business school and i was agonizing over what to do and she said you know it's probably not going to be the last job you ever do and well it's turned out that i've been in amazon for those 24 years since i've done a lot of different things and i think not worrying about trying new things and trying to go with your you know really what your passions are and what you can imagine being excited about and then once you take those jobs whatever they are and how no matter how different they are from your background fully committing and being all in have been common characteristics of the different experiences i've had andy i want to ask you about mentorship and how it's evolved over time what do you view as the modern approach to mentorship today and who do you consider to be a mentor of yours well i i've been incredibly lucky in having um several really influential and terrific mentors along the way and continue to to for that to be the case and you know i think um uh you know and they range from from my dad who has had a big impact on my life and continues to um to people like rick dalzell who was our cio at amazon for the first 10 years i was at the company and it was my boss at the very beginning of aws um to jeff you know who i've worked for now for 20 years and um you know one of the most unique business people and thinkers i think in the world and that i've ever met i i think mentorship at least today seems to be a combination of modeling behavior coaching and then just giving people significant opportunities that allow them to stretch and being for there for them when they need help yeah and i and all the mentors i mentioned i've seen it you know my my dad i you know i i grew up wanting to be like my dad he's you know smart and high judgment and um very level-headed um and humble and never took himself too seriously and um you know he taught he also taught me a lot of lessons along the way and a lot of it was just modeling behavior and things in his everyday life that he doesn't remember but i remember you know so i i always remember this story when i used to play soccer and my younger brother did two and i was at one of my younger brother's soccer games and i was driving my dad nuts i couldn't sit still and the field was in the middle of this track and he said why don't you go run a mile around this track he was trying to have me do something to exercise um my impatience and i ran a mile around this track and i ran it really slowly and uh i got back and i was very pleased with myself and i said see i ran a mile and he just looked at me and he said if you're gonna run it that way don't bother like either if you're going to do something do it right or don't do it at all he does not remember saying that but it always stuck with me in everything i do i if i'm going to do something i try to do it you know right and and give all all the effort i can possibly give and you know i think somebody like rick dalzell you know he he had a way of holding people accountable that was very direct and at the same you know time right after that he had a way of putting his arm around somebody so that they realized it wasn't personal but it was really about making them better i learned a lot watching him he also in the early days of aws as i mentioned i work for rick i had all kinds of questions we were really grappling with with the business model and the definition of services and you know he never answered the questions for me you know even at times where i might have liked for him to have given me the answer he never did he always made me do it myself always made me think it through and that really helped me grow and i appreciated it you know jeff too i mean you know jeff has had and i've had several people like this and i've been lucky who probably had more faith in me than i had in myself at different times in my career and and again always there to give counsel you know i i i learned a lot from him about how to think about having the right leadership team with enough people whose counsel you really trusted and you know how to think about um invention and how to think about the right standards for what you're doing um you know how to spend your time i mean i learned a lot from his counsel but also watching the way that he conducted himself and the way that he ran the business and what he spent time on and so i really do think that the the modern mentoring model has to be a combination of modeling behavior and coaching people but also giving people really big opportunities that allow them to stretch and then being there is a sounding board to help when people need help yeah of the big tech companies amazon probably hires the most people without college degrees how can people develop careers today without a college degree to begin with well you know is it helpful to have a college degree i think yes do you have to have a college degree to have a successful career no and and we're really proud of how many opportunities we have for people of all backgrounds and all educational backgrounds too and we have a lot of jobs particularly in our fulfillment centers where you know you don't need a college degree and you know these are good solid jobs that um you know we pioneered moving the minimum wage to over 15 today our starting hourly wage is 18.32 but it's not just the competitive compensation we also have a set of benefits you just don't find in in most companies you know it's it's full health insurance and 401k and 20 weeks of parental leave and then when you come back after that if you want to ramp up you can have eight weeks of working half the time you know and things like career choice you know which is our program we've had for about 10 years and help our fulfillment center and operations network folks have the opportunity to upskill and to get more education and so we we just now a few days ago that you know a pretty significant enhancement to our career choice program where you know people our fulfillment center employees can have their full college tuition paid for and they also have the ability to get ongoing education every year and to learn new skills and so you know i think when you have the opportunity to make a competitive wage and get you know very full benefits and then the opportunity to keep learning and evolving your skill set and taking on different types of opportunities with the breadth of opportunities we have in the company as well as preparing people to take jobs elsewhere if that's what they prefer it's a pretty good situation yeah andy going back to amazon's earliest years your company has been a standout in welcoming lgbtq candidates talk about amazon's commitment to diversity today what does that look like well you're right in the history um you know and the woman who hired me who called me with my resume in the resume book jennifer cass really was instrumental in getting the same-sex referendum passed here in washington state and uh you know we have um you know we're pretty proud of being recognized by the hrc corporate equality index is having a perfect score of the last several years and we have a very vibrant lgbtq plus community we have about seven thousand people in the affinity group called glamazon here uh but you know i would tell you that having a diverse and inclusive uh culture and company is obviously about more than one group and um it's you know really important and uh you know we see the future of amazon as being diverse and inclusive and accessible and the reality is if you want to do what we do at amazon where we serve so many customers you know hundreds of millions of customers all over the world you have to have a diverse workforce or you won't build the right experiences it's also the right thing to do but just practically you just won't build the right experiences if you don't have the right diversity and so it's a it's a very important area of focus for us and you know we're not where we want to be today i think we've made a lot of progress but we have a lot more progress to make um and we're working hard at it you know it starts with having the right data you know we just released a significant amount of public data on kind of where we are and the you know the improvements we're making um in the areas we have to get better in but it's also not just the broad data it's we have spent a lot of time over the last number of months digging really deep into the detail around how we hire and how we promote and how we develop employees and how we evaluate and and trying to find areas where we can be better and then make those improvements and yeah and then it comes down to you have to have real programs and real goals and and we have you know a pretty broad number of those if i just take some of the goals we have around you know adding more black employees of the company and then having the right career path you know we've built a program called rise which is really a leadership an executive leadership development course for promising black leaders here where they get mentored by senior people and we took a goal in 2020 to double the number of directors and vice presidents who are black at the company which we made and then took the very ambitious goal of doubling it again in 2021 which we're working hard at and we have you know a very broad number of these um diversity inclusion goals and as i said it's it's the type of thing that um you know we've made a lot of progress on but you never really check it off and are done with it you have to really be committed to working on it every day which we are yeah andy one of amazon's core principles is learn and be curious what are you curious about these days i'm curious about a lot of things devin i'm curious whether or not the offensive line for the new york giants and their you know young quarterback daniel jones are going to take a step up this year i'm curious about uh what brady carl's next record is going to sound like i'm curious about what the new lord of the rings tv series we're doing is going to bring us i'm curious about a lot of things but i spend probably the the most amount of time outside of work on the union of educational opportunity for lower socioeconomic families and racial equality and i i think in most modern economies the u.s being one of them it's just very tough to participate in as expansive away as you may want to if you don't have the right educational opportunities it really is the key that opens a lot of doors and you can see it in data if you look at families with household incomes under fifty six thousand dollars only about sixteen percent of those um kids go to college where conversely if you look at families with household incomes over a hundred eight thousand dollars about 82 percent of those kids go to college that's a giant divide and you know one of the organizations i'm involved in here is an organization called raynor scholars and the mission of the organization is to enable kids of color who've never had a family member attend college get prepared for get into and graduate college it's about a nine year program and it's really had amazing results in our city about 91 percent of the kids who go through the program graduate college in five years or less which is more than double the national average and what you really see when you're involved and you get to watch kids and organizations like that is so many kids can do it if they're given the chance you know they have to have the right teaching they have to have the right organization the right structure or the right coaching but if you give it to kids so many kids can do it and so i'm curious about whether we're going to decide as a country that we need to go further upstream because a lot of the decisions and whether somebody's going to believe the educational system is for them is not when they're high school and it's actually not even when they're in middle school a lot of times it's late elementary school and so are we going to build the programs and by the way in some cases some people argue it's in kindergarten or earlier are we going to find a way as a country to go further upstream and help a lot of kids that today don't feel like the educational system is for them feel like it is so they have the same opportunities as kids who grow up in affluent communities well we have covered a lot of ground and received great insight on many many subjects andy i want to thank you for taking the time to be with this career day audience thanks for having me i appreciate it [Music] [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: Inside Amazon Videos

Views: 15,030

Keywords: Amazon Career Day, Amazon Jobs, Inside Amazon

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Length: 25min 36sec (1536 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 30 2021