Oh Dear Amazon... you can do better.
process: personal intro through existing amazon employee, one 20 minute phone call - very positive feedback. Then 3 weeks of emails suggesting I talk to so & so - but so & so never confirming a time. (The person's name changed each week, 'sorry so and so didn't make time, but actually talk to so & so instead...') Final step was on site interview for 5 or 6 hours.
Recruiters had clearly been coached on 'ownership' and 'customer experience' (yes, they consider their candidates customers) but of the 6 people I met during my onsite - only one of them gave it any heed. After an initial intro, they all laid out they would: "save 5 minutes for your (my) questions at the end"... by which point they were looking at their watches, and waving to the next interviewer hovering outside, clearly desperate to get back to their desks & get on with their work load. 4 of the 6 people I met told me they had 15 minutes of their day unscheduled that day... and it felt like your questions were biting into their desperately needed coffee break.
All but one of the interviewers sat with their laptop between them and I (hello, anyone know a thing or two about body language?!) Put it a little to the side, this is interpersonal skills 101! Most of them read their questions off their laptop screens, and as many other posters mention - their questions (all behavioral based) focused on the negative:
Tell me about a time you weren't able to deliver promised work.
Tell me about your biggest failure in your last role.
Tell me about a time you let your team down.
Tell me about a time you made a mistake.
Tell me about how you handle being overworked.
While it's important to investigate the negative, what about the positive too?! I got the sense they were totally stretched, and didn't have very understanding clients - and wanted to make sure their hires could handle the storm. Fair enough, I guess, but I came way relived to make it out the door - feeling it was nowhere I wanted to work! Not just because of the hard work, (hard work can be good) but because these people would be my colleagues & they weren't upholding the values the Jeff Bezos came up with & those values were the reasons I wanted to work there in the first place.
The icing on the cake? My point person - who they called a Closing Recruiter. We'd talked for 4 minutes the day before the interview, and he told me he was 'my recruiter' and asked if I had any questions. He spent 7 minutes with me on the day because 'he was running late for his next interview' (as the only impressive person I'd met that day had overrun). When he called to give me the feedback that 'they were going to keep looking' and he did so while on speakerphone. speakerphone!!
