I applied online and soon received an email asking to complete a pre-interview questionnaire - this contained questions around my motivation and biggest achievements + my salary expectations and other career opportunities I am considering.
Shortly after submitting that I was contacted by a Recruiting coordinator setting up a phone interview with the manager of the team. The interview was very professional, the manager gave me a lot of information about the company and their recent projects and explained the role in detail. He asked me to do a brief overview of my experience and asked me just 2 questions but both of them were performance-based and very broad so that I had the chance to showcase my skills and achievements. Later the same day I got an email that the interview was successful and they set up another phone call with an internal customer.
I knew Amazon does this - interviewing recruiters not only by other recruiters and HRs but also by business leaders and future internal clients (Hiring managers) and I really admire this approach. It is important that the internal customers also participate in choosing their future counterparts.
The business leader I spoke with left me with a very strong impression of somebody who is passionate about recruitment and passive talent (something you definitely can't say about every HM out there) and asked me very relevant questions. They were actually interested in how I would approach the role and its challenges once I start and not so much in what I have done so far.
A week after I was told I was successful and they wanted me to fly to the office for a day of in-person interviews. It took us about 1-2 weeks to sync our calendars but at the end Amazon accommodated my timing and flight requests perfectly.
The whole travel was perfectly arranged and the hotel was great, I had all the info I needed so I didn't need to worry about anything else than my own interview performance.
During the onsite, I had 5 interviews with people from Recruitment, HR and again representatives (on a high management level) from the business. I have read about the Amazon Bar Raiser programme and expected one of the business leaders to play this role but actually didn't feel anything like that during any of the interviews. The respective person was super friendly and informal and we had a great chat about the challenges of recruitment. I actually didn't feel that I had a bar raiser in the interview mix at all...
All people I met were very welcoming, open and easy-going. They put a lot of time and effort in answering my questions, many of them started the interviews with that instead of leaving time for questions at the end and often I felt like I was interviewing Amazon and not vice versa :)
The interview style was very competency-based and performance-based oriented with almost all standard questions around achievements, failures, difficult customers, persuasive skills and thinking on your feet. Be sure you come prepared with a lot of examples and most importantly - details! They will ask you a lot of follow-up and "What you could do differently?" types of questions.
I also had a lunch meeting with a team member who was an absolute delight to speak with and I got the chance to ask a lot of off-the-record questions.
I received feedback 2 days later that they would like to make an offer and got the offer the day after.
