How This Guide Will Help You Prepare For Amazon Interviews
This guide will help you prepare for behavioural interview questions at Amazon. It has a proven D1C Amazon Interview Method (D1C AIM) to prepare for your interview, which has worked for hundreds of candidates who have landed job offers with Amazon.
Note that we wrote this guide with the intent to help genuine candidates prepare. Therefore, we don’t offer tips on manipulating Amazon’s interview process, and we encourage all candidates to avoid resources that try to do so.
Also, note that this guide covers only interview questions based on Amazon’s Leadership Principles. It does not cover coding, System Design or other functional preparation topics.
We are proud of what we have achieved with Day One Careers, and we stand firm in our aspiration to be the most credible source of guidance on how to ace Amazon’s behavioural interviews.
How to Nail your next Technical Interview1 hour
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Step 1: Understand Amazon’s Leadership Principles
Amazon’s behavioural interviews look for behaviours corresponding to their core competencies – the 16 Leadership Principles. These Leadership Principles – or LPs – embody Amazon’s business mantra and penetrate every aspect of Amazon’s decision-making.
So during behavioural interview rounds, Amazon wants to ascertain that you are a future Amazonian. Hence, all questions you encounter during your behavioural interviews with Amazon will be based on the Leadership Principles. You can review all Leadership Principles by visiting Amazon’s jobs portal.
We cannot stress how dear the 16 Leadership Principles are to Amazon. Even candidates interviewing for technical roles (e.g. Software Developer, Data Scientists, Business Intelligence Engineers) should take these competencies seriously.
From our experience, the weight of your behavioural interview results will be at least 80% for non-technical roles and at least 50% for technical positions.
Many candidates only consider the information on Amazon’s website when trying to understand the Leadership Principles. However, each Leadership Principle has multiple sub-themes beyond the official definition. Some sub-themes seem logically connected to the LP definition, while others might appear unrelated or contradictory.
For example, candidates fail to realize that Amazon’s Customer Obsession Leadership Principle does not mean the customer is always right. So they struggle to come up with a credible response when an Amazon interviewer asks them to tell a story about when a customer made an unreasonable request.
Another trap that many candidates fall into is trying to prepare individual responses to individual interview questions. This approach is unsustainable because there are too many questions. Using our collection of vetted Amazon interview questions will help, but you will still quickly run out of stories.
So the only working preparation strategy is to understand the broad sub-themes (facets) of Amazon’s Leadership Principles and develop stories that cover them.
To understand the facets of Amazon’s Leadership Principles, we recommend doing the following:
We recommend our Amazon Interview Whizz – an all-in-one online training that helped hundreds of candidates land L4-L8 roles at Amazon. It is heavily reviewed in our live database of testimonials, so feel free to check them out. Or check out our free taster course to kick-start your amazon interview preparation journey.