Recruiting and hiring are difficult. This is especially true for many startup founders, as they often have less experience with the process. This presentation shares some common mistakes, and ways that Amazon and others have developed processes to improve results.
How many of you have made recruiting mistakes?
Any specific topics you’d like to make sure we cover (from Amazon perspective)?
Dave Schappell - employee #996 from '98-'04. Started TeachStreet and acquihired to Amazon in '12. Now manage Startup BD across EMEA. 100s of interviews over years; hired >50 over 10+ years; am a much better interviewer now; at one point I was terrible and spent a year striving to get better. The process we'll talk about today not only made me a better interviewer, but made it easier to be good.
Chris House - Sr Mgr Talent Acquisition, AWS since April 2015, and has been recruiting at AWS since 2008, and professionally recruiting since 2001. I thought I hired a lot of people, but Chris has probably hired 1,000s!
Define/Understand Your Leadership Principles
What will you prioritize for?
Amazon = Customer Obsession; Bias for Action; Invent and Simplify
behavioral interviewing
brain teasers
phone screens / interviews
min of 4-5 interviewers
Extra assignments? (Bazaarvoice assigns weekend assignments; Sales = Pitch the Team; Developers = real-time coding)
Principles/Process control for that
Bar Raisers implemented to scale
maintain the hiring bar (i.e. B’s tend to hire C’s, C’s hire D’s)
scalable interviewer & process training
can overrule Hiring Mgr
Have an Interview Template/Text file
Consistent questions (share my opener of “what did you do to prepare that other candidates wouldn’t take time to do?”
they should want job as bad as you wanted to get <into college / your first dream job / your VC fundraise> -- how hard did you prepare for that?!?
Know what a good answer to a question is // practice new questions
capture in real-time!
you have to vote +/-
no commiserating before your vote
draft feedback expecting candidate/HR may read/evaluate it
Mark Suster quote
Do you really want someone who isn’t curious about anything? Is that the type of employee behavior you’re looking for, because that’s what you get….
So much easier to calibrate and find really passionate people (MBA interviewing)
Far less easy to ‘settle’
Better use of people’s time, if possible
Varying opinion about references – look for anything that isn’t a raving endorsement (b/c these are supposedly their hand-picked reco’s)
Innocuously probe for any weakness areas, to see if any hints there’s a pervasive problem
Work LinkedIn to see if any personal connections (be careful with this)
aka not 'owning it' -- aka 'you can't outsource sales'
teams should own much of their recruiting (at Amazon, we compete to review resumes; only 2 can tag)
Chris House
How to grow ‘really fast’ – what changes?
Technical Interview-specific points
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