Transcription
In this video, I'll give you a number of tips on how to best answer interview questions, um, in job interviews with Amazon. Of course, I'm going to be focusing on behavioral types of questions, and I'm going to, you know, try to do a better job than ChatGPT, uh, as I'm seeing more and more of you are enjoying using it nowadays. Okay. Number one: How do you show customer obsession? I might tell you right from the start that this is harder than many of you expect to answer because there's a discrepancy, uh, between standards of different candidates, and this is actually so efficient that, uh, many other high-performing companies have also embedded this customer obsession in their core values or leadership principles. Right so, um, to give you a number of counter examples to exemplify what I'm saying here, a developer talks about how they fixed a critical production bug on short notice, you know, as if they made their customer a favor for doing so. Right, so this is not customer obsession. Right? Or I have instances where people talked about, or Bankers talked about, how they literally cornered the customer into the best possible deal for them. All right, so this is again a bit shady. Or I also had an example of an executive, um, bragging about how they hurried up selling a business unit for being afraid of getting sued due to some shady business dealings, not under their command, of course. Right, so needless to say, customer obsession is when you literally go above and beyond for the customers, for the right reasons as well. Right.
The second question I like to talk about here is, "The time it got stuck 75% through a project, and how did you get it done and was it a successful one?" Right, so, um, to answer this question in the best possible way, you must think about what is challenging in your specific role, for your specific job description, and can you think of a time when your strength helped you to overcome difficulties and eventually get the job done? Right? Could be a project, but could be some other type of initiative as well. Right? For different types of roles, if you're thinking about the leadership principle here, this is "deliver results," right? And notice I'm trying to help you here: "Was it a successful one?" Uh, because what happens here is many candidates, uh, choose to shoot themselves in the foot by talking about a success or slightly successful type of initiative, right, where the question clearly asks you a time when you got stuck 75% through a project. In a job interview, sell yourself as a successful candidate. Right? Most of the time, unless you know what you're doing, which is, you know, some people who are really, really skilled at interviewing and could sell themselves on failures, um, then you should talk about a successful project which you successfully completed ultimately. Right? "Deliver results" being the leadership principle in question. Right, so don't shoot yourself in the foot; just talk about a successful one. Right? And think about what's challenging for your specific role if you want to have the best possible answer to these types of questions.
Number three here: "Tell me about the time you failed." Right now, um, I'll just start by saying that, uh, you should not talk about a failure which will put your reputation in danger, such as how you got fired from your last job for a critical mistake two months ago. Right? This is the type of fail you wouldn't want, or you'd be skeptical, uh, putting forward, especially in a job interview, of course, unless you know what you're doing. Right? But more interestingly, maybe for many of you, would be, uh, a couple, a couple of scenarios where, um, a failure story would make the most sense. So why would someone ask you for a failure story? Um, they could do it because, uh, people, um, who don't prepare job interviews in advance will have a harder time answering failure, uh, questions in an efficient way, so they, they would use it in a way to gauge, uh, if you prepared your interview at all. Right? This would be the first thing. Um, the second thing would be to see if you can sell yourself on this story because it's perfectly possible, and I even encourage you to sell yourself with every possible answer in the job interview, and the way you'd sell yourself on a failure story would be through its learnings. Okay, so half of your answer should be your learnings, and, uh, I must warn you that, uh, if you find it difficult to find the number of failures you feel comfortable talking about, and finding its learnings will take at least as much time as it took you to come up with a failure story in the first place. Right? So long story short, learnings should be half of your answer, and don't shoot yourself in the foot. You'll to say here. Um, and also, um, the third scenario why someone would ask you this is because some people prefer to, um, have a tendency to never ever agree they failed. Right? "I, I don't fail; I only learn," and some people would even further, especially the ones who don't prepare interviews, uh, would tend to go on the general side and would refuse altogether to talk about when they actually failed; they would, they, they talk about how they would fail, right? Or, um, you know, this is also another interviewing technique if you want, or a "fake it till you make it" type of approach, like don't answer the question but try to get around the corner and talk about the project which was not so successful, but indeed it was; they want to dive deeper into it. It's your choice. Right? It's just that I'm talking in the context of interviewing with high-performing companies who really know what they expect from the best candidates. Right? So I'm trying to advise you on how to give the best possible answers here.
Number four: "Tell me about the time you had to deal with an ambiguous situation, such as when you didn't have enough data to make the right decision. How did you approach the situation? What was the outcome?" Right? So needless to say, you want to talk about a success story here. Right? And if you're wondering what leadership principle is in question, uh, this would be "are right, a lot." Okay, so first things first: What is ambiguity in your role? How do you define ambiguity for your role? Because there's different levels at which you can speak about ambiguity depending on the type of role you're into. You know, obviously an executive, uh, would regard ambiguous situations differently than a DBA admin, if you want. Okay, so for example, a DBA admin could be predicting latency of a new config under some data-intensive scenario. Right? And, uh, basically the best answers in such a scenario, you know, I'm, I'm giving you here would be when you use previous experience to determine the best course of action, or when you ask for additional advice to remove some ambiguity or to bring in clarity even, or you simply recognize you need additional info to make the right call. I don't know, maybe you attended some courses to, uh, to arrive at the best possible way to eliminate this type of ambiguity. Right? But this would be the, the three scenarios, three elements which would greatly, significantly improve the quality of your answers on how, how would you deal with ambiguity such as when you didn't have the right data to make the right decision. Right? So you, um, you could, uh, basically use your previous experience, previous similar experience, or ask someone else around this, or educate yourself on the specific needs of this project. Right?
Number five here: "Tell me about the time you convinced someone of something." Um, so how do you convince someone of something? Okay, you focus on gaining their trust. Okay, so it's a trust issue most of the time. Okay? And, uh, if this sounds easy to you, then in my experience it's quite easy to even unintentionally, uh, put the blame on someone else or even on the company that you previously worked for, or you say it's simply bad luck. Okay? So, or even worse, I've had people publicly humiliate or criticize others in this context. Right? So, "Tell me about the time you had to convince someone of something" is a question; how do you build trust there? Right? So, um, again, the examples, the, the, the context of this question is around, around assessing your interpersonal skills; it's "earned trust" as a leadership principle if you want, but what you want to focus on here is the keyword "trust." How do you build trust with stakeholders in an initiative, if you want? Right?
Number six: "Tell me about the time you had a major disagreement with your boss." Right? So it's the same type of question in the sense that you still want to focus on trust, and now it's a slightly different leadership principle: "Have backbone; disagree and commit." So, um, what you want to do here is to basically have two avenues: first, on how you find the proof, you know, maybe you found some data to make your point, to convince them that, hey, yes, um, the disagreement and you are right, using the data; and the second part of this would be to, uh, communicate this in an efficient way, you know, with the goal to establish trust. Right? So whereas in the first, in the previous question, "Tell me about the time you convinced someone of something," trust is the central and the main thing you would want to do, this and could also embed this one: "Tell me about the time you had a disagreement with your boss." Now, this disagreement with your boss is on a slightly different principle, but the key thing is the same. Right? And as I said previously, you don't want to put the blame on someone. Right? And even further, for the purpose of "have backbone; disagree and commit," you don't want to come across as argumentative, uh, which, in my experience, people who come across as argumentative are also the most likely who did not prepare their job interview or who simply cannot get over some sort of previous experience that they find it like it was super damaging the way they felt and simply could not get over it. Right? So if you have examples that you're not really confident you can talk about in a job interview, um, you know, I don't know, ask someone else or try to role-play with someone, but if you still feel not confident about it, then find something else. You know, um, a job interview is about confidence as well; like most confident candidates are also significantly more likely to bias the interviews towards them. If you speak convincingly or if you put together a great show for, um, an example here. Right.
Number seven: "Why Amazon?" Okay, so, um, what I would want to highlight here is that the vast majority of candidates answer this question of "Why Amazon?" by praising the company over and over and over again and talking again about the leadership principles they connect the best with and the amazing people they are going to work with and the amazing company with an amazing growth trajectory with an amazing stock market, uh, performance this year at least, and and so on. Um, what many of you, um, what many of you could greatly benefit from when answering these types of questions is to really think what's in it for you as well and say, sell yourself on that, uh, during, during this interview, because, um, this will also exhibit a bit of commercialism on your side that you, you really, you're not there just to execute whatever they'll ask you to do, but you'd also, you know, show a bit of a backbone of what's in it for you. Now, to get this to the extreme, of course you're also going there for the money, of course. Now, um, you could say it as well; I don't think they—if you feel that that's appropriate—but I believe if you spend a bit of time for the right reasons to prepare an answer to this interview question of "Why Amazon?", I think you'll, you'll come to the conclusion that you can find out, uh, many more interesting reasons of what's in it for you if, uh, you get hired there, and you know, in a bit to make your answer different, to make your answers differentiate yourself from other candidates. Right? Because it's the memorable type of answers, for the good reasons of course, which, um, make or break the show there. Right. Um, so long story short, "Why Amazon?" still gets asked. Right? I won't talk about the elevator pitch in this video, but on why "Why Amazon?" still gets asked, and I believe it's worthwhile investing a bit of time there of thinking what's in it for you and what can you share from that perspective with your interviewer. Right.
Number eight here: "A time when you set a vision when there wasn't one." Okay, so if you're thinking about what leadership principle is this one, this would be on "think big." Right? So, a vision when there wasn't one, um, here, you know, to give you a quick example from my own experience, um, it was maybe around a year ago when ChatGPT, uh, became more mainstream, and I also started integrating it into my training programs, and I allowed, uh, candidates to generate examples using ChatGPT for examples to interview questions for your own specific role, and I noticed, you know, there's really interest in using these features, you know, it's—I call them pleasure features—and I thought what would be the best way to further integrate with such features to also, you know, draw some results, to, to make it to draw some more interesting benefits from this, and what I came to realize is that, um, instead of rewarding you with answers for interview questions for your own role, I could reward you for writing your stories by implementing a feature to evaluate your stories. Right? So this was the vision I had, and I believe it's, uh, quite successful actually; I'm pretty convinced it's quite successful, and since I have many, many people adding thousands, thousands of stories and using those features, using generative AI to evaluate your answers specifically on Amazon's leadership principles as well, and, uh, this brings value and this significantly increases the quality of your story banks, and, um, overall, I think it's, it's been quite, uh, successful. Right? So this is an example of a vision. Now, what is a successful vision for your own role? Focus on results; like notice in my example, uh, my goal was to increase engagement in my training programs, and, um, if before I had hundreds of stories and literally I had to fight with candidates to give me their stories, now the candidates feel like it's a beneficial tradeoff to give me their stories in return for using those features to evaluate them. Right?
Number nine: "A time when you jumped on something outside of your area of responsibility, but definitely in your company's best interest." Okay, so, um, this is on the leadership principle of ownership. Right? "Take ownership." And here I thought of exemplifying this with a, with maybe an exaggeration on a personal level. So, um, have you ever saved someone from drowning? Okay? So this, this is the type of experience, you know, if you wanted to correlate a little bit, um, to business and leadership in general, like again it's an exaggeration, but this is—you'd want to highlight your ownership, not getting something done because of the sake of, um, being done—something memorable, ideally. You know, this was, uh, my point here.
Number 10: "A time when speed was of the essence." Okay, and the leadership principle involved here was "be biased for action," and maybe the most classic example would be when having to estimate a timeframe for a project to finalize a bid, yet still some requirements not being crystal clear. Right? Still time is of the essence, and you have to deliver on that, uh, estimation so the bid can move forward. Right? Instead of, um, focusing on the accuracy of those details, and what's key here if you want is that decision is that timeline you give there is a reversible one. So many times projects go over time and over budget, uh, for the right reason because it's impossible to estimate them; it wasn't key to estimate them accurately in the first place. So if you want to think about, uh, how do you showcase speed in decision-making, you talk about reversible decisions in particular. Right? The decision was reversible, then it means speed could have been core in that scenario. Right?
Number 11: "What is your most recent invention?" Okay, so, um, the leadership principle I believe is obvious, but, and I believe this is an easy question to answer for most candidates; however, um, can you make your answer memorable, an answer that they could remember after a week, after a month, or after a year, ideally? Right? So for example, I had a candidate who talked about how they implemented an AI system to spot potholes, uh, using cameras mounted on garbage trucks. Okay? It's something that's memorable, or a patent-pending algorithm to achieve something. You know, these are the type of experiences which, which are memorable, and I believe this is how you score the best points for this particular scenario of an invention. Right?
Number 12: "How do you learn?" Okay, so, um, how do you learn? In HR, there's a, there's a well-known trick that you must showcase how you exhibit curiosity in learning by using multiple sources. Right? So you don't just, uh, take your information from one channel, but rather use a broader range of sources. What's also important, what's also key here in the way you learn is, um, uh, concepts such as forward thinking or experimentation. You know, um, basically want to stay away from, from, um, familiarity, if you want, or from familiar approaches. Right? Or just being that old-fashioned type of person who thinks backward in a way. Right? So this is how you exhibit, you know, that type of a little bit of curiosity and forward thinking and that type of experimentation, if you want. Right? This would be the key here.
And finally, what's your weakness? Number 13. Okay, so the dumbest weakness I, I've ever heard would be "interviewing skills," like "I don't interview well," as if this was the core for the role you were applying for. Right? Um, now a slightly better one would be "public speaking," you know, which is over a decade old and still widely used, widely used in, in job interviews today, uh, just not for high-paying jobs. You know, I mean, I, it's, it's simply out of fashion these days. Now, what's interesting for answering this interview question, "What's your weakness?" could be, um, something from the job description, something that's usually the elephant in the room. Right? So if you have something that you clearly don't have experience with, and they know you don't have experience with, you could address that when answering the weakness question in a way that, in a, in the, in a bid that you can sell yourself on that by addressing, by this concept of addressing the elephant in the room. And actually, I've had great success with level seven type of roles with addressing this elephant in the room, because on the thinking that if you prepare this in advance, then you could as well sell yourself on it. And I won't get into details, you know, because this video will get too long, but, uh, the weakness question, if it gets asked, you still have to sell yourself on it, and the more interesting, the more memorable, the more likely you are to buy, the, the interviewer towards you, and this is what, uh, makes, this is what delivers job offers in, uh, today's market. So hopefully you found this interesting, and thank you very much for watching.