Tell Me About A Time You Were 75 Percent Through A Project And Had To Pivot Quickly How Did You Handle It
Life happens when we are in the middle of projects, and Amazon leadership will want to know how you handle these types of situations when they occur. You could encounter this question for many different types of roles, including technical and management positions. Your answer should speak to your agility, leadership, and problem-solving skills:
At my last job, I was leading a project that was near completion. Everything was moving smoothly and on-target for timely completion. Then, one of our partners providing one of the software upgrades that were to occur at the 90 percent mark encountered a breach of their systems and was estimated to delay the project by two to four weeks.
I had to review our plans and come up with options to keep the project on target as much as possible. Going with another software provider wasn’t a viable option, as the groundwork had been laid to go live with the current provider, and starting over would have delayed the project even more. Instead, we were able to allocate two resources to support the provider in recovering from the breach in less than half of the time that was projected.
As a result, we were able to complete the project only two days after the originally scheduled completion date. Fortunately, since we had built in a cushion for contingencies, we were able to go live on schedule.
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We’re working hard to provide the best candidate experience possible, so we’ve made some improvements to the sign-in experience. We want to make sure you’re able to access all of our new features. Resetting your password will allow you to see the new and ongoing changes coming to amazon.jobs to make your experience great.
Phase 2 First Phone Interview
My first phone interview was scheduled at an exact time with the manager of the service that I was interviewing for so basically my intended future boss. I remember I spent the whole day looking up common interview questions for programming, and watching a lengthy video series over data structures so that I knew the time and space complexity differences over iterating between arrays, hashes, binary trees, etc. A few minutes after 2pm on a Friday, I received a call from the manager well call him Bob . All in all, the phone interview lasted about 1 hour and 10 minutes and it really wasnt technical at all. No coding, no super-deep programming questions. Initially, the phone call seemed a little bit bureaucratic in the sense that I had to verify that I was expecting this call and made sure I had allotted a full hour to speak but it quickly became very relaxed.
Before we got off the phone, I asked for Bobs email address . I was told that I would hear back within the next week about whether I made it to the next interview. This part was pretty crazy to me, because it wasnt even a full hour before I heard back from the Amazon hiring manager saying that I had passed the interview and they wanted to schedule another phone interview with someone else to assess my coding abilities. This next interview was scheduled for the following Thursday, this time at 3pm.
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Engineering And Technical Interviews
The leadership principles and your culture ï¬t are critical to getting hired, but the greater your technical expertise, the more ï¬exibility Amazon will have on the âcultureâ piece. Amazon will give you either a surprise test during the interview or an actual engineering/ coding test . If you are applying for any position that requires the use of Excel , theyâll probably test your pivot table skills for 20-30 minutes as part of the interview process. Be prepared. If you are applying for a business analyst position, for example, they probably wonât tell you if there is a test, but depending on how technical it is you can at least expect they will test your SQL skills in the interview.
This may not necessarily require you to use any database management system, but will come in the form of a question like, âIf you have two SQL database tables that are not joined together, how would you create another table to join them?â For any positions that require programming skills, you can expect the coding test to come at the start of the process. This means it will either be your ï¬rst or second interview, right after speaking to an HR person/recruiter. This is not going to be an extremely complex test that will require hours of your time. It covers the fundamentals of the language so you should brush up on the basics. You can chat with a technical interview coach on Carrus to practice and review your code .
Prepare In Advance For The Stages Of The Hiring Process You Can Prepare For Answers To Tricky Behavioral Questions
For the other three stages, however, you can prepare.
If you are running out of time, or feel anxious, or overwhelmed with the information, or have no idea how to answer the questions, have a look at a new eBook I wrote for you, the.
Multiple brilliant answers to 50 Amazon interview questions, including all tricky behavioral questions, will help you stand out , impress the interviewers , and sign an employment agreement with Amazon. You will find some questions & answers directly on the eBook page, so it makes sense to check it out even if you do not want to purchase anything
Thank you for checking it out, and I wish you good luck in this difficult interview!
Matthew
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Who Is The Bar Raiser
One thing could make or break the outcome of whether or not youâre hired at Amazon. And that one thing is the
Bar Raiser
finding someone whoâs better than half of the people working at Amazon at that level. A Bar Raiserâs role is to make sure that every hiring committee focuses on maintaining and improving this bar. Bar Raisers have extensive knowledge of Amazonâs Leadership Principles and their primary purpose is to ensure that candidates that are chosen are those who will âraise the barâ on performance in their team. Itâs a way for Amazon to avoid hiring unsuitable candidates especially in times when teams are anxious to fill a role. The primary questions that Bar Raisers will be assessing you on are those related to their Leadership Principles. But which ones? â any, but are more likely to be leadership principles that are less related to functional aspects of the role,â says former Amazon career coach
Hereâs an example:
Letâs say youâre applying for a marketing position. The Bar Raiser is not going to be the one to ask you a functional question like how you would approach a marketing campaign, what data you would analyze, and how youâd plan out the deliverables. Instead, the Bar Raiser could ask you something like, âTell me about a time you made a bad decision,â to assess you on your behavioral competencies on decision making and course correcting.
Kevin weighs in:
Learn The Shortcut For Answering Any Leadership Principle Question Without Knowing Which Principle It’s Asking About
If I ask you a behavioral question that would be typical in an Amazon interview, how will you know what principle Im asking about? If I ask, When have you taken a risk? do you know which principle this question falls under? How quickly did you figure it out?
I want to talk about how to know which principle a question is about because this is a topic my clients ask me about frequently. Many clients make spreadsheets with their stories and map them to the proper principles. I think this is a good thing to do. But what if you do this and still you cant remember the correct principle once youre in the interview?
I used to tell my clients to memorize the most common questions for each principle so that they would immediately know which principle to target in their answers. I still think this holistic approach is the best method in preparing for an interview at Amazon, but it can take a lot of time to become familiar with fourteen principles time that you may not have if your interview is coming fast.
So Ill give you a shortcut: just make sure your answers to whatever principle question – show your excellence or high performance.
Think about the principles as a whole
Use the shortcut instead of panicking
So once again, before the interview ask yourself what the principles as a whole mean. Why do they exist? What are the interviewers really looking for?
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Consult With An Exponent Coach
Here at Exponent, we understand that it may be both extremely exciting and nerve-wracking when you have an Amazon interview just on the horizon. That’s why we put together some Interview Prep Courses for Product Management, Software Engineering, Data Science, Product Marketing Management, and many more.
Alongside our courses, we also offer industry-leading interviewing coaching to help you
- Get an insiders look from someone whos been interviewed, got the offer, and worked at the companies youre applying at.
- Receive an objective evaluation of where you stand as a job candidate.
- Obtain personalized feedback and coaching to help improve and get more job offers.
A few of our coaches have even worked at Amazon, so you can trust that they know exactly what you need to do to prepare. If you’re interested, be sure to check out the profiles of former Amazon interviewers Abhishek Joshi,Sai Boddupalli, and Vichitra Kidambi to request a coaching session today.
Skipping The Line Of Applicants
I needed to find out a way to get an interview with Amazon. I could apply online, but applying online SUCKS.
I once submitted 188 applications online. And only 5 of them reached back for an interview. Thats a 2.7% interview rate. What a waste of my time.
Aside from having a terrible resume, I was only applying to Big-N companies that I didnt have a referral for. Had I applied to medium-sized companies and startups, the number might have been different! When I was looking for my first full time job, I applied to companies of all sizes, and had a 15% interview rate. There, had to stroke my ego.
The point is, dont apply online. Learn from my mistake.
Anyways, I reach out to a friend of mine. This friend, he was also going through the interview process with Google back when I was doing it as well. He ended up going to Amazon, and we kept in touch.
When I ask him for a referral, he is eager to give me one. Awesome stuff. As I mentioned before, getting a referral at a company is like skipping the lines at amusement parks.
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Automated Interviewing With Coding Challenges
Unlike the , where the initial assessment is a phone screen, Amazon expands this assessment to sometimes include a coding challenge.
Some interviewers prefer this method, as the performance anxiety of interacting with another person is absent, and the only requirement on your end is to write code that executes correctly and efficiently.
This is also positive for Amazon, as they do not need to expend resources on conducting 30-45 minute interviews with candidates. Furthermore, they can also expand their reach substantially, as this process is somewhat automated.
Oftentimes, these coding challenges are driven through an engine similar to that of HackerRank, where your code is automatically analyzed for syntactic correctness, efficiency, and correctness for the task at hand. This gives a better signal to the interviewee about how well they are performing during the interview itself.
While all of these coding assessments will have instructions, they will often mimic those of HackerRank insofar as actually using the same submission and judging criteria.
Therefore, it is most likely a good idea to play around with the HackerRank interface, practicing a few problems to ensure that you do not get tripped up on the interface itself. This way, you can then just focus on solving the problem.
What Are The Top Tips To Help Prepare For Amazon Interviews
Go beyond the surface and try to unearth information about Amazon’s Leadership Principles that would give you an idea of why they are what they are. You can do this by reading The Everything Store by Brad Stone . You can watch YouTube interviews and lectures of Amazon’s S-team . The more you understand what drives the LPs, the more you will be comfortable in unexpected situations .
Research the most frequently asked Amazon interview questions and map them against Leadership Principles . Do not overdo this. Use it to get a better feel for what behaviours Amazon expects candidates to demonstrate against each LP. Note that there is no way to tell if the questions from the Internet are authentic.
Prepare 23 stories about situations from your professional life that best demonstrate behaviours mentioned in each question. Prepare a cheat sheet with a table listing all LPs and situation prompts against each LP. Be sure to have a column with Key Results and another for Lessons Learned you’ll need them later.
Note you can re-use stories if you think that they can work for more than one LP, but avoid doing it more than twice.
For recent grads your extracurricular activities, not your classwork, is your treasure chest. Lean into that part of your academics for stories and situations .
Always make sure that you have outcomes and results for every situation. These have to be real. If you don’t have results that you can measure, how would you know if you were successful?
PRACTICE!
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Until You’ve Mastered These 50 Questions
Preparing for any interview requires some work, and this is more so for a company the size of Amazon, where competition is very high. More preparation is always better, but whats more important is the quality of preparation. After reading this post, you can rest assured that you will have greatly enhanced your chances of passing the interview!
How To Pass An Amazon Aws Job Interview
The following interview tips are applicable for all Amazon AWS job positions. Please make sure you study the tips carefully and then apply them during your preparation:
TIP #1 There is a strong possibility you will be asked three different types of interview question during your Amazon AWS interview. These are as follows:
- AWS technical-related interview questions
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What Is The Amazon Interview
What exactly is the Amazon Interview? What should you expect when you walk into the room?
The majority of the Amazon interview consists of coding, and this is what the focus of this post specifically will be about. For strategies regarding how to ace your system design interview, consult the following post from Byte by Byte.
Lets break down the primary components of what the Amazon Interview consists of.
How Will An Amazon Interview Assess My Performance Against 16 Leadership Principles
Every interview question will be “testing” at least one LP, which is why if you research the Internet well enough, you can collect the most frequently asked LP questions and map them against each LP. I’ve also pulled together a vetted list of Amazon interview questions to give you a sense of some of the most frequently asked themes. I don’t recommend that you focus too much on mapping questions to LPs. Use this exercise to get a flavour of what the questions may sound like but do not make this the central part of your preparation.
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Write The Situations Down & Flesh Them Out
After youve brainstormed relevant work experiences, write them down and flesh them out so that you’re not stumbling to remember some of the details amid the questioning. Make sure to write them down according to the STAR method, as well, to make sure your answers are both concise and fully developed.
Questions Asked At Amazon Phone Interview:
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