Transcription
Hey, I'm Gigi. I'm an ex-Amazon senior leader and bar raiser. So today we're going to talk about the "Tell me about yourself," "Walk me through your resume" type questions that so many of you get and quite frankly have no idea what the interviewer is looking for.
If you've seen any of my live sessions or some of my other content, you'll know I hate these questions. I think they're really bad interview questions. And, hey ho, actually, so do the senior leaders at Amazon who actually came up with the whole Amazon interview process. And I can give you evidence of this. I'm just going to show you this book here. This is *Working Backwards* by Colin Bryer and Bill Carr.
Now, Colin and Bill were both, in the past, very senior leaders at Amazon, and they worked closely with Jeff at a time where those key mechanisms that we all know and love today about Amazon—like the leadership principles, the hiring process, the document writing culture—were all being created and evolved. So they were there at the coalface; they were part of creating the actual leadership principles and the Amazon interview process. And I read their book, and I was heartwarmed to see that they feel the same way about those interview questions as I do. I'm just going to quote to you from their book in terms of how they feel about it. So two quotes I wanted to read to you. Give me one second, please.
All right, so the first quote—and if you have this book, this is on page 24—so the quote comes in the context where the writer is telling us a bit of a story about someone who had been interviewed in another organization and their thoughts on the interview experience of that candidate. So they say, "The kicker following an unusually long pause: 'Tell me something about yourself that isn't apparent by reading your resume.' You might as well just say, 'Look, I don't know what I'm looking for or how to find it. So can you please help me out?'" Clearly, they don't hold a very high view of the quality of that question that they're retelling the story from.
Another quote—and again, if you've got this book, check this one out on page 41—but they're trying to describe what the Amazon interviewer is trying to achieve in their interview. So here we go: "First, the interviewer wants the candidate to provide detailed examples of what they personally contributed to solving hard problems and how they performed in work situations like the ones they'll experience at Amazon. Second, the interviewer wants to learn how the candidate accomplished their goals and whether their methods aligned with the Amazon leadership principles." Now, this is the kicker bit: "General open-ended questions such as 'Tell me about your career' or 'Walk me through your resume' are usually a waste of time and will not produce the kind of specific information you're after. When asked such questions, most candidates will take the opportunity to deliver a positive, perhaps slightly glorified narrative of their career."
So there we go. I completely agree with these very, very smart gentlemen, Colin and Bill. They're bad questions. The reality is that this bad practice of asking these types of questions and taking the responses quite seriously has filtered its way into the Amazon interview process. I can tell you this because I hear it from my candidates all of the time. So whether I like them or Colin and Bill like them is totally now irrelevant; you're going to have to deal with them. So let's now make that our starting point.
The first thing to then, I guess, cover off is: Does your answer actually matter? Yes and no is the truth of it, and we'll start with the "no" bit. So why I say "no" is the evidence that is meant to be used to make a decision as to whether Amazon is going to hire you or not—and if you are bar raising—is meant to be evidence either how you behave and demonstrate evidence against the Amazon leadership principles. My point being: demonstrate the evidence, or your technical competencies. Again, you have at some point demonstrated evidence of this, either through having to do some kind of very specific technical assessment. If you're a developer, you would have done some coding. If you're a finance person, you've probably been challenged with some kind of SQL or building a financial model. If you're a marketer like me, someone's probably probed you quite deeply in your actual interview process about some of the technical specifics that you might have mentioned about your knowledge about running experiments or PPC or—sorry—that paid search for SEO type stuff. Um, they'll have found that nuggets of information about technical competency. Those two areas are really the only data that is supposed to be considered to make a decision as to whether you're going to be raising the bar. It's evidence-based.
Now, when you are at the final stage—loop panel, final round, whatever you want to call it—there's a bar raiser there, and the bar raiser knows that those are the really the only two evidence points—concept buckets, whatever you want to call them—that are meant to be used to make a decision on you. So they will police the process, and they will make sure that it is only that type of information that is tabled and is used to make a decision on you. So when it comes to that final stage, your answer to that question really doesn't count all that much. Quite a lot of people will ask it, but primarily it's going to be a warm-up question because they should know—and certainly the truth will kind of rubber to the rubber to the road, that's right, isn't it?—um, when it comes to your d-roof, is your bar raiser will police that. So when it comes to your final round, your answer doesn't matter all that much.
Now, when I said "yes" as part of the yes or no, when it comes to earlier rounds, it is going to have an impact because in the early rounds a bar raiser has no oversight. Your bar raiser doesn't get involved until the final stage. So it's really your interviewer, the hiring manager, whoever you're talking to on their own. Got to bear in mind that at that stage, really what they're trying to kind of understand for themselves is: Is this person going to want to do this job? Are they going to stick around? Am I going to hire someone that wants to work for me or in my team, or am I at risk of hiring someone that's only coming to this job because they can think they can get this job and then maybe jump to another role that isn't so easy to get in from the outside? Trust me, people have that strategy all of the time. So those are some of the thought processes that are going on in their head. And because of that, they "Walk me through your resume," "Tell me about yourself," also "Why Amazon?" But we're not talking about Amazon now; I have another video about that, why those matter much more in the early rounds. So you need to be prepared with an answer.
So how are you going to answer it? First thing is you've got to bear in mind that you are in that room with a very limited amount of time. You're not in a room; you're in a virtual room. You used to be in a physical room; now you're in a virtual room. Bear with me. Fixed amount of time to convince this person that you are right for this job. So there is no point in giving them information that has no bearing whatsoever on whether you have the ability to do the job or do the job in Amazon. So I personally strongly advise against telling them about personal details about yourself—what your hobbies are, how many children you have—those types of things. In many countries, that's actually not evidence that anybody's even legally allowed to use, um, to make a decision as to whether to move you forward or hire you. But also, it's impossible for them to then use that information to decide, "Is this person a good fit for the role?" So avoid that type of stuff.
So I'm going to take you through three strategies that I think you can use. Strategy number one is, let's call it chronological resume. Take your interviewer through your resume chronologically. Now, obviously, if you've got a very long career, you're going to really want to skip over the very early days and pick a point at which you're going to start kind of taking the narrative a little bit more seriously. Work through your roles, where you've been, where you've come from, and tell the story about how each of those roles has moved you on to the next role. What skill did you learn? What area of interest was created by working in that role, and why that took you to the next role? And then when you get to the next role, do the same thing so that you can then culminate in this role that you're applying for and help the interviewer see the journey of why this role is now the right role for you and you're the right person for this role—kind of the narrative arc as to how you got to hear this place today looking at this role. So that's one strategy.
The second strategy that you can deploy, let's call it as a project-focus strategy. So again, go through your resume. Now, in this sense, I don't think that it matters too much if you go forward in time or backwards in time, but my suggestion is about talking through your resume and skipping over roles that aren't really that interesting and don't have opportunities for you to talk about your deliverables and your experiences that relate directly to this role. But stop at particular roles in your career history where you do have an opportunity to talk about specific projects that, number one, were really impressive; number two, that you really enjoyed; but most importantly, number three, show a set of skills or capabilities that resonate with the role that you're applying for. So that way, yes, you're talking through your kind of career history, telling them about yourself, but you're very much focusing on evidence of your skill set that justifies why you're a good fit for this role. So that's my second strategy.
My third strategy—and this is actually one that I use myself—is instead of actually going through your career history, what you do is you literally talk about yourself professionally. So why do you do what you do? What do you love about marketing, finance, solutions architecture, whatever it is? What is it about those roles that you absolutely love? Maybe throw in a bit about how you found yourself in that space in the first time, but what do you love about them? What are you particularly good at in them? What are your particular strengths professionally? And what do you particularly enjoy about being a manager or whatever it might be—telling them about the professional you. And once you've done that, you can then bridge those kind of key highlights into how your passion, your skills, um, the thing that kind of gives you fire in being a professional, relate to the role that you are interviewing for today and why that means that not only are you a fantastic fit for this role, but also the company is going to be really fantastic for you in terms of your career evolution. Don't make your answer run too long; I suggest no more than maybe one or two minutes on this.
So that's it. Those are my three big tips. If you found this useful, please do drop a comment in or give me a little thumbs up. As I said, I am not a fan of these, and neither are Colin and Bill. However, I think it's pretty inevitable that you're going to get something along these lines at the Amazon interview. Now what you need to do is click on this link here and go and grab yourself one of my free Amazon Interviewers Academy customer obsession master classes. Watch that, and you will nail every single customer obsession question asked of you at your Amazon interview. Or if you'd like to do that later, check out this video here for more great Amazon interview bar raiser tips on interview strategy.