I am a big fan of Amazon as a Company and I got really excited when they called me for an interview. In the beginning the interview process was a bit confusing because I received around 5 calls from 5 different Amazon recruiters and employees which I was fine with, but later on they told me that based on those phone calls I was chosen to be interviewed by 5 different Amazon employees that where going to interview me personally; I started to have a flashback from my High school years by having that final exam feeling that I haven't felt in a long time. The recruiter told me that Amazon was very focused on metrics, business cases and all of the specific details of my persona, all of this was during an scheduled phone interview. Then she sent me an email with documents that explained the Amazon culture and the highlights of what Amazon looked in their employees, I got the feeling that they wanted to cut to the chase on the interview, but to be honest it also gave me a certain pressure that I needed to be as prepared as an actor goes to an audition, like they were asking me to prepare the lines and to act as they wanted me to act for the role. So the judgment day finally arrived, and my 5 hour interview was happening. At first everything was very friendly I received a "warm" welcome (I say "warm" because I could tell everything was according to the company's protocol) and the interviews began, I was asked a number of very structured questions such as "can you tell me of a time you failed, and how did you deal with this?" or "Please give me a success story and why was it successful?" ; these questions are perfectly fine and actually very normal on a job interview, but what I was not very fond of is the fact that you could tell does questions where made by recruiters or HR personnel and the person that was asking them, in one of the interviews, was a Finance Manager for Amazon who obviously felt the need to ask for specific metrics, numbers, percentages, etc ; and how do you establish these parameters in for example "I created a new image for the company, with a renewed image and a more modern look" or "I created a employee reward program to keep them motivated and to encourage team work"? Again, the following questions were all about why did you create that program? and as I tried to explain, appeared like nothing was good enough "team work?" "why?" "did it worked?, if yes, why? please elaborate"; I gave the obvious answer "Well because people started to have a deeper feeling of ownership and a better sense of what we needed to succeed as a Company"; and the following question was "What metric did you use to say that it worked?" WHAT? During my professional career I interviewed a lot of people for several different roles and this Amazon process felt way too structured and a little bit robotic, with no digging into the persons character or potential. When I interview someone, off course I want to know his or her professional abilities, but I always try to dig more into their personal drivers, goals and interest in both the short and the long term, maybe the company is not what he or she is looking for in terms of growth or vision. I think that there is nothing more expensive than hiring someone that is going to be unhappy everyday he comes to work, those are the less productive employees and the more expensive ones, because they are never going to give the extra mile. In this process it felt like Amazon was doing me a favor just to be there listening to me, like I owe them something, and the reality of this was that it was a little bit of a disappointment for me on the perception I had of Amazon before the interview. I don't know how is the work environment in Amazon, I hope that they don't treat employees the way they treat the people they are interviewing because if they do, the only thing I can say is "Treat your employees the way you treat your costumers" and since that's the Company's main concern "the costumers" (and they do a great job at it), they should not have a problem with that.
