Questions To Ask In An Amazon Interview Recommended By An Ex Bar Raiser

questions to ask in amazon interview gosh i've seen a lot of tosh about this on youtube and various other places i am if you don't know i'm gigi i am an ex-senior leader hiring manager and bar raiser at amazon i have actually already done a video on how best to use question time but i don't go into very deep detail about specific questions but rather the principle behind how to use question time so i've decided just to do this video to give you some of my favorite questions that candidates have asked me in interview and why it is that they're my favorite questions and why you might want to think about them and i'll do that in a minute i just want to briefly go over the video that i have done previously and the concept behind how i think you should use question time so what you'll find is a lot of coaches will talk about using question time to ask really insightful and challenging questions for your interviewers to kind of see how brilliant and genius you are and that adds to their interest in hiring you you might not know this in fact not many people i guess will share this with you but at amazon the questions that you ask at the end are not meant to be used from a policy point of view are not meant to be used as evidence to decide whether you are raising the bar on the leadership principles or have the technical competencies because those are the two variables that they are using to decide whether they want to hire you the questions you ask are not supposed to be used for data the questions that you're supposed that you can ask is meant to be a safe space so question time is meant to be a safe time where you as a candidate can gather the data that you need to make a decision as to whether if they offer you the role whether you want to work there is it the right company is it the right role is it the right hiring manager and that's why it's meant to be a safe space because you should be able to ask whatever you need to ask to get that data through the one thing that you really really must do and i all coaches will tell you this is you must ask questions because although the specific questions that you ask shouldn't be used as data for evidence for you if you don't ask any questions that is data because effectively people who work for amazon are expected to gather data before making decisions and if you as a candidate in one of the most important decisions that you'll be making in the next let's say three to five years assuming that's your average tenure in amazon one of the most important decisions that you're going to be making if you don't try and gather data in order to be able to inform yourself to make that decision then you don't smell like an amazonian so you must ask questions i know candidates often say i've been through this process before i've asked all of the questions that i need to ask i don't need to know anything else or i have friends in amazon and they've told me everything that i need to know honestly it doesn't matter just ask the question and if you don't ever use that data fine it's not an issue but the time is there available for you to ask and therefore you want to show that you are the person that goes out and gathers data so now let's talk about my favorite questions and questions that you might want to have a think about i've broken them down for you into three groups because there are essentially three groups of people that you're going to meet through your interview process and we're going to start with the most important person for you they're not the most important person but they're not the most important person in the hiring process but they will be the most important person to you if you take the role in amazon and that is the hiring manager so i have my trusty list here of questions so that i don't get any of them wrong and i don't forget i'm going to share them with you and explain why i liked them as questions when candidates asked them to me and quite frankly why i've stolen them when i then interview for places so first one and lots of interview coaches will tell you about this one is ask about the key challenges of the role all right the whole point of talking to the hiring manager is they're going to be probably the person that's got the most insight into not only the role but the expectations of the role ultimately it's the hiring manager that's going to set your goals and it's going to be the person that takes a view as to whether you're delivering on those goals so if you want to know what really the truth of the key challenges of the role are the hiring manager is the best place to go and if you're going into making a decision you want to know what the tough stuff is you want to know if the tough stuff excites you or doesn't excite you so i don't think you should shy away from asking what would seem to be negative questions because again if you're data gathering you're going to be looking for the truth real data that you can make decisions based on so don't be scared of asking what might sound like negative questions to anybody in your interview process just frame them politely so that's the first one the second one is this is an interesting one and it can take you down a few different paths why has this role become available now obviously the hiring manager will try and need to put a positive spin on this but you can still gather quite a bit of insight on kind of the back history of the role and of the team based on the hiring manager's response so maybe it's a new role okay so if it's a new role it's going to be really ambiguous so all sorts of mental processes should start firing off in your head if you hear that it's a new role the likelihood is whatever the job description says the role is is probably not exactly what the role is going to turn out to be it's going to be something a bit it's going to evolve as with a new role you're probably going to be able to have a lot more say in the scope of it and exactly the shape of the role itself if it's a new role the hiring manager isn't going to quite know exactly what it's going to look like so there's going to be a lot of opportunity for you to work closely with the hiring manager and show ownership but if it's a new role there's going to be a lot of ambiguity so probably ambiguity about how you fit in with other people in the team around you maybe there'll be ambiguity in terms of how you fit in with kind of partner teams and where the overlap might be so that's a really useful thing to know is it a new role second thing they might tell you is that the person that was in this role has managed to get themselves a fantastic role in another part of the business that they really wanted to develop their skills into okay well that's a good sign it's a good sign that in this role somebody could evolve in terms of their skills and their capabilities and this hiring manager has obviously been supportive in terms of moving this person on and helping them evolve their career to move into another part of the business hiring manager might equally say actually this role wasn't a very good fit for the person who was in it and they decided to move to an external opportunity outside amazon all right so there becomes a little bit tricky to really understand the nuances you know did the person underperform was it really not a good fit were they just bored and their time was over who knows but that kind of answer where someone just says okay well this just somebody ended their time here they just felt this wasn't kind of where they wanted to stay and that they were looking for opportunities of growth outside of the organization you just kind of have to accept that one slightly on face value because there are so many nuances who knows what the answer could be and you wouldn't want to dig into the hiring managers to really really try and probe you know where they managed out did they hate it did they love it but then somebody and their past came along and gave them a better opportunity i don't know but that one's kind of less insightful but it's good to really understand how a role came into being because that will set up context for you in terms of what you can expect okay so that was my second one my third one this is really really useful in early rounds okay so maybe round one or round two sometimes you'll meet the hiring manager in round one sometimes you'll meet them in round two hopefully you'll meet them before you find yourself all the way at loop but so this is a great one and this one is ask what type of traits would make a candidate successful in this role and the reason why i think this is a really good question to ask is they are very likely to give away to you what the most important leadership principles are for the role which of course is something that you do want to know so that you can prepare your strongest stories for those leadership principles as you go through the process which is why i suggest asking it in early rounds because you might be able to get yourself a little bit of inside knowledge to help better prepare you should you make it through now warning do not ask them what are the most important leadership principles for this role it's just too it lacks finesse let's put it that way it's too blunt and it's too obvious right so don't do that but if you just use the word traits i promise you because amazonians live and breathe and speak the language of the leadership principles they're very likely to give you the leadership principles in response to that question and even if they don't just pay really close attention to the language that they use and write it down because then you'll be able to link that language out to the leadership principles once you actually finish the interview okay and then the last one that i'm going to give you when it comes to a hiring manager and again this is another one that i think is so super telling and insightful is to ask the hiring manager what their favorite leadership principle is and the reason why i think this is great is because it gives you such an insight into the type of person that you're going to be having as your hiring manager so if somebody asks me what are my favorite leadership principles or what would be my favorite one for me it's dive deep i i'm always into the detail i roll up my sleeves i do the nastiest most menial tasks in my team if they need doing i'm very happy to jump into the trenches but i also want to know as much as i possibly can about what everybody is doing in my team not because i'm a micromanager but i like to be informed so that if a question comes my way i can bat it straight back out without actually ever bothering my team member you notice i kind of look at them behind me i tend to be i'm one of those people that leads from the front so i imagine myself kind of at the front of my army of people and they're all behind me and i'm here to back things away and stop people getting getting in their way so that they can deliver their job so sorry that's why i was doing that so yes so i would be a dive deeper so anyone coming to work for me would be able to go okay this person is going to want to know a lot of detail so i reckon i'm going to have to create mechanisms and systems to communicate them with them really openly and transparently so they don't ever have to ask me for the information i can enable them to self-serve and then they'll keep everybody away from me so that's the conclusion you would draw if you ask me other people might say learn and be curious so you know if you've got learner a leader who's all about learn and be curious you can imagine you'd be doing all sorts of kind of interesting and different things and that they would a little bit similar to dive deep but they would be trying to learn and understand from you that leads you to imagine a very particular type of manager direct report relationship if they were to say ownership ownership is my favorite leadership principle you'd also get a sense of okay so this is a go-getter this is a manager who like just sees stuff and makes it happen and grabs it and won't give up and will stick with something until the bitter end well if that's the type of manager they are they're probably going to have that expectation of me and by the way this is true of all leadership principles right if a manager has a particularly preferred leadership principle chances are they would want to see that reflected in their team because that's just the nature of things um so ask that question it's super super insightful in terms of the person that you're going to work with and the management style they're going to have all right so we've done my favorite ones when it comes to hiring managers so now let's talk about team members because you're going to get interviewed by people who are going to be your direct peers they will also work for the hiring manager that you're working with so first thing i like this question what drew you to this team that just gives you a really good sense of what's that team's reputation in amazon and what what does it look like from the outside so you want to know what motivates people inside amazon to go and work for that team or indeed if they came from outside amazon what was it that they saw that made them jump ship from their old company and come and join amazon so what is the appeal that they saw in the team that's just useful to get kind of a sense of well what does everybody else see in this thing and then i'd follow that with well what surprised you when you joined this team because then you've got the counter perspective you've got well what did it look like on the outside what were your expectations so you're kind of creating a proxy you at this point you know they're an alternative version to you but they were you a year ago six months ago whenever it was they joined the team what surprised you okay so now you're creating kind of a future view of yourself and what you might be thinking and feeling on the inside in a year's time or six months time so understanding the gap between what the expectation is from the outside and what the reality is from the inside can be very useful now i mean bear in mind when you say what surprised you i'm going to assume that in the majority of cases the person is going to tell you positive surprises rather than negative surprises but again just pay really really close attention to what they're saying because even when people say things in positive language you can kind of reframe it for yourself and ask yourself well okay i know they're kind of shaping this positively but if i was going to try to think about what might be a negative lead into this what might it be that could be very insightful okay so the next one when it comes to team members that i've found very interesting when people have asked it of me is what if you had to guess would you say is the hiring manager remember this person is also reporting to the same hiring manager that you're going to be reporting to what would you if you had to guess say was your hiring manager's favorite leadership principle now this is awesome as a question because if you ask this of multiple people around the team and then compare them to each other and then compare them to what the manager says because you're going to also ask the manager this question super insightful number one do they match right so sometimes what somebody believes to be kind of their core strengths and the thing that they would kind of label themselves with is not what everybody else sees and discontinuity yeah discontinuity between those things is super interesting now it can be super interesting positively or it can be super interesting negatively it's obviously going to depend on exactly what responses you get but that's really really interesting and then if you're asking those multiple people and comparing their answers to each other you want to see some continuity there if you see nothing that's common then i would be wondering how well does this manager actually work with their team as a whole and is there good communications um but again just the different perspectives that they'll give you will be super interesting in terms of creating a very rounded picture of this individual because of course you're going to be asking them what's your favorite leadership principle but there will be others everybody has a few different leadership principles that are kind of high up their list of preferreds okay so then finally now that we've done the hiring manager and we've done a team member you're also going to meet people in your interview process who are from adjacent teams or the bar raiser who's not going to have anything to do with that team whatsoever and you need some good questions to ask them so that's where you are slightly broader questions about their amazon experience as a whole because of course they might not know the specifics of the individual role that you're applying for so a couple of good ones that i've always liked from those is first question what do you find most challenging about working at amazon so remember i did say don't be scared of asking the the difficult questions because hey you've got to find out about it at some point and just that that becomes very insightful in terms of do you hear a very consistent narrative across the board do you hear varying narrative across the board and then you can think about are those challenges challenges that i'm up for am i up for that type of experience and does that excite me or does it terrify me if you hear a lot of consistency and everything that they're saying terrifies you then you know that tells you something about whether you are going to enjoy working at amazon or not the next one then i think the last one that i'm going to give you is and this ah this was a really interesting one that somebody asked me once and i really liked it because it really made me think and that was is there anything that continues to surprise you in a positive way about working at amazon i really like that as a question because it it forced me to think about the good stuff because you know clearly um you know they've potentially you've come to the um interview asking them some of the more difficult questions so or challenging questions so if you're asking them kind of what has continued to surprise them positively i believe it should give you a sense of what the ongoing juice will be to keep you fired up in your role at amazon you want to be able to get a sense of what's going to keep me going here you know am i going to every single day every single month every single year and of course we all have ups and downs right there's no way everybody loves their job every single day that's that's denial if anyone says that there are ups and downs but broadly speaking you you hope that you can go into a role where more often than not you are enjoying what you're doing and there's something that just keeps inspiring you and keeps you going and just keeps you growing and interested and i think that question that somebody asked me once really helped me identify that for myself i found it useful as something to hold on to when i left the interview and to think about as an employee of amazon but for you as a candidate again kind of the range of answers that you'll get the consistency or the inconsistency of those answers and then whether that information is something that you think yeah that speaks to me that's kind of something that i think would also get me going is super helpful because from a data point of view you want to understand how am i going to motivate myself on an ongoing basis working for this organization and usually it's going to it's got to be the good stuff right and if something can keep surprising you over and over it's really really good stuff and that's the stuff that you probably want to make sure should you join the business that you've got some kind of a hook into so you can benefit from that yourself so if you found that useful please do put a thumbs up on the video or maybe put some questions or comments in the comment box below now what you need to do is click on this link here and go and grab yourself one of my free amazon interviewers academy customer obsession masterclasses watch that and you will nail every single customer obsession question asked of you at your amazon interview or if you'd like to do that later check out this video here for more great amazon interview tips on interview strategy

Channel: Amazon Interview Whizz @ Day One Careers

Views: 215,737

Keywords: questions to ask in an amazon interview, how to get a job at Amazon, how to pass an amazon interview, amazon interview questions and answers, amazon interview tips, amazon interview questions, amazon interview, amazon leadership principles interview answers, amazon interview preparation, amazon phone interview, why amazon, amazon behavioral interview questions, amazon interview experience, amazon interview process

Id: qxxm6XhrGIY

Length: 21min 3sec (1263 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 11 2021