It is not every day that you find yourself seated in front of the founder and CEO of a multinational company – in this case, Jeff Bezos – in an interview. And, it definitely isn’t every day that you also get hired by him, on the spot, just after answering two simple questions. That’s right, according to a recent revealing by a former Amazon employee, to CNBC, she was hired by Jeff Bezos after only answering two questions in her interview with him. Ann Hiatt, who was interviewing for the position of a junior assistant, recalls the fun, and surprising details of her interview with Bezos. This was back in 2002, when Bezos, along with being the founder, was also the CEO of Amazon.
Jeff Bezos’s Odd Interview Questions (Could You Answer Them?)
My job interview experience at Amazon
My initial interviews at Amazon were dizzying in volume and pace. I had back-to-back interviews with all of the senior assistants, some of them lasting all day.
One interview took place in a dark office with just the glow of a code-filled monitor and a weird multicolored rotating nightlight in the corner. But I had known enough tech people in my life and was used to the awkward settings. I just chalked up the encounter to one of those personalities uniquely suited for the tech world and was unfazed by it.
A few months later, after I had not heard back and was beginning to lose all hope, the phone rang: An Amazon recruiter asked me to come back for a final interview. She apologized for the long, drawn-out process and promised me that this would be the last one.
What she didnt tell me was that it would be with Bezos himself.
The 2 interview questions Jeff Bezos asked me
I felt relaxed going into the interview that October morning. I was patiently sitting in a conference room chair when the door opened and in walked Bezos. He sat down across from me and introduced himself.
Bezos started the interview by promising that he was only going to ask two questions and that the first one would be a “fun” brainteaser.
I took a deep breath as he stood up and uncapped a pen at the whiteboard wall. “Ill do the math,” he said. “I want you to estimate the number of panes of glass in the city of Seattle.”
Then I paused to calm down, reminding myself to think about his motivation for asking me that question. He wants to see the way my mind works, I told myself. He wants to see me break down a complicated problem into small, manageable steps. I can do that.
I outlined how I would start with the number of people in Seattle, which I thankfully correctly guessed as around 1 million, just to make the math easier. Then I said that they would each have a home, a mode of transportation, and an office or school — all of which would have windows. So I suggested that we base the estimate on averages of those.
And then we did the math.
We got down into every possible scenario, group, anomaly and ways to account for these exceptions. It felt like I talked it through for hours while Bezos filled the whiteboard with numbers. Im sure it actually took more like 10 minutes.
I remember feeling a thrill when he wrote down the final estimate. He circled it. “That looks about right,” he said.
He then asked me the second question: “What are your career goals?”
I told him that Amazon had proven to be a company full of ambitious and passionate people. I wanted to be like them and learn what they knew. Their strengths were in the areas I personally wanted to develop, so the value of the experience was obvious, even though it felt like a diversion from my goal of being a professor.
I explained that I had no idea how to be an assistant, but that I knew the importance of being consistently outside of my comfort zone. I wanted to jump into an astronomical learning and growth curve.
Knowing Bezos as well as I do now, I see why those were his only two questions. He was measuring my potential by asking questions that would explore whether I had the grit, courage and motivation to run at his pace and be brave enough to consistently jump with him and level up.
By the end of the interview, we both knew I would do anything to be successful, despite being a very junior candidate.
And then I was done. Exhausted, exhilarated, done.
Bezos ended up hiring me on the spot. He gave me the open desk just three feet away from his own. It was the closest desk to him at the company.
A former Amazon employee spilled the tea on what went inside the conference room during an interview with the worlds richest man, Jeff Bezos.
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.
FAQ
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