I. Love. Hiring.
Four practices I've learned as an Amazon Bar Raiser that can help you hire better
Unquestionably, without a doubt … people are the most important part of management. Hiring people. Coaching people. Developing people. Growing people.
We are “people leaders,” first and foremost.
I love all aspects of people leadership, but hiring holds a special place in my heart. Why? The interview process is the beginning of the employment journey, and new beginnings are always joyous. Plus, I get to meet so many incredible and talented people in interviews. I love the fact that I can shape the hiring process, and through it, help level the playing field for candidates who might not otherwise thrive in the process. And, hiring provides an opportunity to shape my team and its culture with each new addition.
For all of these reasons, and more—I. Love. Hiring. So much so that when I joined Amazon, I became a Bar Raiser (BR) as soon as I possibly could (at the time, you had to be at Amazon for over a year and have completed >25 interviews to be considered for the BR training program).
Now I’ve hired a lot over the course of my career—literally hundreds of people over my nearly three decades as a manager and people leader. I’ve conducted over 100 interviews since joining Amazon, alone.
And even with all of my hiring experience, I’ve learned a ton in the last two years as a BR. I love the the methodology and rigor that Amazon brings to the hiring process, and the role that BRs play in upholding it.
While not every company has the same type of structure (or in some cases, any structure) in their hiring process, here are four practices I’ve learned and employed as a BR that anyone and any company can use to create more inclusive hiring processes, identify the right talent for the role, and build the strongest, most diverse teams:
1. Have a neutral third party run the interview process
How many times have you seen someone hired into an organization who wasn’t a good fit for the role because there was urgency—or even desperation—to fill the position, their candidacy was influenced by someone in power, or simply because the interview process didn’t do a good job of uncovering the candidate’s skills and strengths relative to the role they would fill?
At Amazon, the BR’s role is to maintain a high bar for the interview process and hiring decision, and they cannot be a part of the team doing the hiring. Because they have no stake in the outcome, BRs are not swayed by urgency to fill the role, referrals, or general likeability of the candidate, and can ensure the team objectively evaluates the candidate against the hiring criteria—leadership principles (LPs) and functional competencies of the role in Amazon’s case, but your criteria could be different.
You don’t need to have a Bar Raiser program to do the same. The next time you go to hire, include neutral third parties in your interview process and invite one of them—a peer manager from another team, perhaps?—to lead the evaluation of candidates to help ensure a more objective interview process.
2. Assess behavior, not skills
Too many job postings and subsequent interviews focus on what the candidate knows—their project management skills, if they know how to do a SQL query, how they do pipeline management, and so on. While functional competencies are critically important in some roles (you wouldn’t want to hire a surgeon who isn’t highly skilled in surgery), the reality for many positions is that we over-index on role-specific knowledge and skills that are highly teachable and can change over time. This is especially problematic when we consider the half life for job skills is now 3-5 years.
At Amazon, we focus on behaviorally-based questions, primarily centered around Amazon’s LPs. Consider what behaviors someone needs to be successful in your role—today and in the future—and ask about those, instead. Need someone who is detail-oriented and driven by data? Ask questions about how they have dived deep into data and used their analysis to inform a business decision. And since past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior, frame your questions about what the candidate has done in the past, not what they would do in a hypothetical future situation.
3. Ask fewer questions, and go deeper
I did an interview once where the panel had 13 questions(!) to ask me and said they’d leave time for my questions at the end. The interview was scheduled for an hour. 🤦🏼♀️ Needless to say, we didn’t get to my questions. Too many interview processes include one of two (and sometimes both) structural mistakes: 1/ interviewers ask too many questions, so they only get superficial level information about the candidate’s experience or perspective on the topic, and 2/ interviewers ask ad hoc or redundant questions, so they don’t get consistent information across candidates and/or they don’t get a breadth of information across interviewers.
As mentioned above, we focus on behaviorally-based questions at Amazon, with each interviewer covering only 2-3 different competencies (LPs plus functional skills). Assigning different people to cover specific and unique topics allows each interviewer to go deeper with their questions, and collectively, creates a fuller, more complete picture of the candidate’s experience and strengths.
When you ask the candidate to tell you about one of their past experiences, dive deep to understand what the situation was, what decisions and actions the candidate took (versus what others did), and what the results were. Ask follow-up questions to understand what motivated them to take the actions they did and how they did it, specifically. Inquire about what challenges they had to overcome, what mistakes they made, what they’ve learned from that experience, and how they’ve applied those learnings to their work. This detail will help you better understand how the candidate approaches their work and paint a picture of how they’re likely to perform in your role.
4. Hire for the future
Sometimes, urgency to hire outweighs other considerations and we hire “the best” of the available candidate pool, even if they’re not the ideal person for the role. Consider the multiplying effect you get with a good hire—and the sometimes catastrophic impact a bad hire can have on the team—and, well … please don’t do this.
Other times—perhaps most of the time—hiring decisions focus on what the team needs in the role now—the experience, skills, or person who can do the work today. This may result in a great candidate who can hit the ground running on day one, but often means you’ve hired a lifelong [insert role here … bookkeeper, copywriter, salesperson, etc]. They’re only ever going to be/do that one thing, and if there isn’t a career ladder above that role or if the company’s needs change over time, your once great hire may have nowhere to go.
One of the roles of the BR is to remind interviewers that we hire people who “raise the bar” today and have long-term growth potential at Amazon. Look for someone who has skills and experience that augment and enhance your team, whose presence raises the level and the quality of the team and the individuals on it today. And, hire someone who you can clearly see growing not only in the role but with the company over the long term. Assess how they have learned and grown in their previous roles, and taken on new challenges in the past (because, say it with me … past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior).
There is so much to love about the hiring process, and using these practices can make it even more interesting, effective, and inclusive. And because I can’t get enough on the subject, here are two more quick tips that can create more inclusive interviews:
Reduce unconscious bias in the interview process. When writing or talking about your candidates, use “the candidate” or “they/them” pronouns rather than she/he pronouns or the candidate’s name. Not only will this help reduce any unconscious bias (there is well-documented research on how men and women are evaluated differently in the hiring process, here’s one example of many), it will also ensure you’re not inadvertently misgendering the candidate.
The interview process shouldn’t be a trick or test. Tell the candidates what you’re going to assess them on so they can be fully prepared to show you their best self. I like to paste my questions into the chat so the candidate can refer back to them if needed. Unless the role you’re hiring for is to answer random questions on the fly under stressful circumstances, you’re not helping the candidate or yourself by making it a secretive process. And, you might be biasing against introverts, neurodivergent folks, and others who may not be able to recall random examples on the fly but are nevertheless highly qualified for the actual role.
Great read and 100% agree on the incredible responsibility of the Bar Raiser. Being an neutral third party is so important for calibrating across the company and providing that unbiased set of eyes to the process.