Landing an interview with Amazon might feel like one of the most exciting — and intimidating — things to happen to you. Amazon, like most organizations, puts a lot of effort into hiring the right fit for their open positions. As CEO Jeff Bezos once shared, “Id rather interview 50 people and not hire anyone than hire the wrong person.”
It says a lot if your resume got past the gatekeepers and into the hands of an Amazon hiring manager. Now, take a deep breath and get prepped for your interview.
How to answer Amazon interview questions
From the lengthy list of interview questions that Amazon candidates share online, you can expect that an Amazon interview will rely heavily on situational and behavioral interview questions.
Behavioral interview questions focus on past behavior as an indication of future job success, while situational interview questions ask how you would handle any number of hypothetical situations. With these questions, you can also pull from past experiences to answer how you would handle the hypothetical situation today or in the future.
From there, you can break behavioral and situational interview questions down further into competencies, such as leadership and communication. Using the STAR method during an interview is an excellent approach to answering these types of questions.
Now that you have a foundation on how to answer Amazon interview questions, its time to practice. Below are three of the top interview questions you are likely to encounter during your interview.
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 wasnt 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.
Given the plethora of services that Amazon offers, it is pretty obvious that a lot of people want to join Amazon and be part of its evergreen culture. But what really is the secret sauce to Amazon’s humongous success? Well, if you ask this question to any of the employees at Amazon, we are pretty sure that everyone would unanimously say: The Leadership Principles of Amazon
Amazon is renowned for its huge disruption of industries through technological innovation and mass scale. Being the worlds largest online marketplace, AI assistant provider, and cloud computing platform, Amazon has a workforce of over six lakh employees, out of which over fifty thousand are Indians. It is the largest Internet company by revenue in the world right now and the second-largest private employer in the United States. Because of this, Amazon has the highest global brand valuation.
Earths most Customer Centric company, Amazon was founded by Jeff Bezos from his garage in Bellevue, Washington on July 5, 1994. Amazon is an American multinational technology company whose focus is on a large number of fields, for instance, E-Commerce, Cloud Computing, Artificial Intelligence, Digital Streaming, etcetera. It is considered to be one of the Big Five companies in the United States Information Technology industry, along with Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Facebook.