Amazon Interview Strategy - CRUSH The Loop

so in this video I'm going to share the mental model and strategy that help me secure my job offers from Amazon and that I believe will help you be successful in your Loop by the way when I say Loop I'm just referring to the final interview at Amazon which is sometimes referred to as a loop or onsite interview I'm going to walk you through a winning mindset what to expect from your interview how and how long to prepare for that interview and some other tips and tricks before I get into it just so you know

I'm not going to be discussing any confidential things like interview questions this is simply a mindset and strategy that I believe would be helpful to absolutely anybody considering interviewing at Amazon or AWS and I'm not even trying to sell you anything isn't that nice my one ask however is if this video does help you land a job at Amazon DM me on LinkedIn or leave a comment here in this video it's so helpful for me and and motivating to know that when I make a video like this it actually helps somebody and makes a difference

all right let's get into it I'm going to start with the mindset to be successful before I even start talking about the format of the interview I just want to start by Framing this so you can understand what you're walking into and how to approach it I think a lot of people have a misconception or at least I did when I first interviewed at Amazon that it was going to be this kind of adversarial interaction where the people sitting on the other side of the virtual or physical interview were skeptical of me and trying to

like stump me in the interview and and maybe coming at it with like an elitist mindset and that really couldn't be further from the truth every single individual I've met at Amazon and every interview I've met at Amazon consistently delivers only like positive will and positive intent towards those people that they're interviewing at least that has been my experience and I think a big reason for that is you Amazon does maintain a very high hiring bar so they really do try to hire some of the best and brightest in their fields and that actually creates

an environment sometimes where it can be difficult to hire somebody if you are maybe a manager or uh somebody that's building a team at the company so that actually leads to a hiring environment where most often the people that pull you into the interview process are rooting for you because it is difficult to hire because it is a high high standard for hiring so everybody wants you to succeed people want you to say the right thing and do the right thing to get the job offer that said you need to prepare for your interview regardless

of how much positive intent that there is coming in your direction so what should you expect on the interview day most roles at Amazon especially at AWS and Technical roles they have functional interviews and then what they call their Loop or their onsite interview which is like a cultural interview in a sense this video is not really going to help with the functional or technical interviews because those change and Vary a lot based on job family but the final interviews at Amazon what they call the loop or the onsite is actually a relatively consistent format

it's documented quite well online you're going to be asked a lot of Behavioral questions and you'll be expected to give an answer in the Star Format you've probably heard of this already if you're watching this video If you haven't it stands for situation task action result it's a well-known framework for answering behavioral questions in job interviews this framework is encouraged by Amazon and a lot of big Tech firms when you get to this final interview what's going to happen is you're going to have scheduled usually a number of interviews I've seen it as low as

three or four and as high as six or seven interviews where you're going to sit with maybe 45 minutes to an hour with a series of people maybe your manager maybe potential teammates people that are cross functional maybe people holding similar roles and you're going to be asked these Behavior avoral questions these behavioral questions are meant to align with something called the Amazon leadership principles I'm going to touch more on how to prep and answer questions in line with leadership principles in a second but if you don't know what the Amazon leadership principles are and

you're thinking about interviewing at Amazon this is something you need to read up on as of today there are actually 16 Amazon leadership principles please Google Amazon leadership principles if you're not familiar with them already because when you're going going into Amazon interviews it's very helpful to read these leadership principles understand them the goal is two things one you want to make sure these leadership principles actually resonate with you if you read leadership principles and you say wow like this resonates with me this is how I believe I live my career or how I would

at least aspire to live my career that's great you could be a good fit for the Amazon culture but if you read leadership principles and you find that they don't necessarily resonate with you it could be that it's not maybe an ideal cultural fit and that's okay there's a lot of great companies with different cultures out there Amazon is not the only great place to work in technology so familiarize leadership principles and expect that Loop interview usually it's going to happen after your functional interview but again I can't really say exactly how it's going to

be for each and every role because every role at Amazon can be a little bit different so always always always verify with your recruiter because they will be the source of truth if you get into an Amazon interview for what to expect throughout the process talked about behavioral questions and Star Stories I'm going to spend a lot of time here because I want to give you some advice that was massively helpful for me and this is really the meat of what I want you to take away here for your preparation strategy so when you're asked

a behavioral question an example might be tell me about a time when you failed to meet a customer deadline that's just an example of something that might sound like a behavioral question they often times start with tell me about a time whenn there these open-ended questions and you're expected to give a specific example of something that you did that answers that question and the ideal answer will have specific actions that you completed and some result either a measurable result or maybe even an antidote uh of the outcome of whatever that thing that you did the

story that you're telling in response to the question I'm I'm going to talk about how to prep your Star Stories here in a second I have an amazing strategy for that but let's just start with how you should think about each individual story we're breaking down Star right situation task action result so if you think about any story any question you're going to answer if you are a decent Communicator most stories that you tell are going to naturally start with the situation and the task this is like scenario building right so these are in my

opinion they're important for comprehension and setting the stage but when you're preparing an answer to a question I want you to really really emphasize the action and the result here's why I say that the interviewer is going to be assessing how good of a fit you may be based on the leadership principles that you exhibit and situations and tasks don't exhibit leadership principles in fact what really exhibits leadership principles in my personal opinion is the actions that you take so when you're telling your Star Story make sure that you have actions and I mean specific

actions one of the biggest pitfalls that happens when you tell a story is maybe somebody might stay kind of high level about their story they'll talk about I delivered a a project for a customer I worked with um this cross functional team uh we developed a deliverable for this customer and we closed a uh large deal and signed a four-year contract with the customer well that story that I just told frankly sounds like a whole lot of nothing that is not a helpful story that would not be a very good way to answer any Star

question any interview you want to go down really a level deeper okay you want to say something like we were delivering on this project where the customer needed us to develop a new front-end application now I had been the team lead and had a lot of experience in frontend applications but this customer had a unique new request of integrating that with a large language model so I had to uh figure out how to integrate my front- end code with that large language model in a secure way so I was I read documentation I spent some

time experimenting with code uh I I leaned on a mentor that I had to to help me understand this and ultimately it turned out to be a little bit easier than I thought I was able to develop that application at a short period of time and exceed the customer's expectation because of the speed at which we delivered on the project um ultimately the customer signed the contract and renewed and cited that one of the primary reasons that they did was because of the speed at which I delivered the exact product that they described uh to

my company right so that story I just told you very specific right down in the details I talked about exactly what I did Mak sense those are the type of stories you want to now I'm not saying that was a perfect story but the thing I want you to latch on to there is I was talking about very specific tasks and things that I did and if you do not do that when you answer an interview question any type of behavioral interview question Amazon or otherwise you're wasting everybody's time really get down there in the

details okay and by the way that takes practice for some people now let's talk about the r the result when we think about the result some things that might be helpful to keep in mind are measurable results are there any metrics maybe sales metrics Revenue metrics timeline metrics customer satisfaction metrics usually if you work in a field or industry and you have some experience there are metrics tied to your job or tied to your performance and so performance metrics can be a great result for a star story but it doesn't always have to be like

hard data it can also uh be something like an anecdote or like an award or like something that happened um that is evidence that whatever thing that you did the story that you're telling was valuable and helped you your employer and your peers your customers the people around you final thing on the stories before I talk about how you should catalog and organize your stories is data this is something that you'll hear is that you want to put data in your stories and what I mean by that is like reasoning for the stories like maybe

if you make any major decisions and there was some research that you did maybe you read a paper maybe you talked to a friend maybe you connected with an expert on slack whatever like little data points can be uh very helpful and I would say in general you want to keep your your answers I try to keep my answers no longer than 4 minutes and I would try to make my answer last about 2 to four minutes when I was practicing answering these star questions and finally you can expect the interviewer to follow up right

and clarify if they need more information or maybe you miss a detail so don't fret too much if you happen to miss a detail uh your interviewer is a partner in this and and they may very well follow up and ask you for more information but try and tell the story well the first time through and and uh make it very clear the behaviors that you exhibited and the results of that okay so that's the makeup of how I think about entering Star Stories personally now how do you even invent and create all of your

stories from past experiences and also how do you organize them right for me this was the hardest part what was extremely helpful to me and something somebody told me that is incredible information is for each interview you might want to have between four and five stories so for me it looked like having between 20 and 25 stories in total and by the way you can keep notes uh I'll touch more on the notes later but one thing that's true about most professionals is every story you tell if you're telling 20 stories every story can't be

the best most World shattering story on earth right you're going to have some A+ stories some B stories and maybe even a couple of C stories that's okay um every story can't be the best thing you've ever done uh but you you can kind of sprinkle those A+ stories maybe what you might call a bar raising story through out your interview if you have a few of them and I would say for me like my makeup of stories trying to come in with about 25 stories was five A+ stories about 10 or 15 B stories

and then a couple of C stories just cuz I wanted to have some extra stuff in case they asked a lot of questions I actually never really even got to answering with those C stories I was able to mostly um answer with relatively high quality stories in my opinion now what makes story in A or B it's again what you did the leadership principles you exhibited while doing it and then the result of that thing now I said something important the leadership principles you exhibit notice I said plural leadership principles right hear me out here

when you're asked a behavioral question a behavioral question is usually targeting a particular leadership principle I'm going to give you just an example question this might be an example of an earns trust question tell me about a time when you failed to meet a deadline for a customer how did you handle that that question might be used to sus out how you go about earning trust with a customer after you've lost trust right but as an individual it's actually incredibly difficult in an interview setting whenever tensions are high and stress is high to hear that

question process it and then determine and map it to a particular leadership principle so I would encourage people don't try to map your question the question you're being asked to leadership principles in real time you can if if you're intelligent and fast enough that that's amazing I personally am not instead what I encourage is just coming prepared with Rich high quality stories okay and here's why if you have stories that are just jam-packed full of anecdotes examples of how you exhibit leadership principles in your words and in your opinion even if somebody asks you a

question that's maybe probing for earns trust if you answer that question with something that really exhibits maybe not earning trust but it might exhibit customer Obsession and Diving deep these things are all kind of interconnected if you're obsessed about customers and you dive deep into the technology with them you're probably earning their trust right and also even if you manage to somehow Totally Miss the leadership principle the person was trying to ask about they may follow up and get more clarification but they will probably take note as long as you are always showing that you

exhibit the qualities of an Amazonian with those leadership principles even if you don't give them the exactly your principle it still can be a great answer that benefits you in that interview that's my strategy for forming those questions is really write them down and I keep notes the way that I brought notes to which by the way it was told to me that it's fine to bring notes like it's a remote interview or even if it's in person like having your resume in front of you is normal at an interview like having some small notes

not like I was reading exactly from the notes they were just bullet points to jog my memory of of these stories that I'd kind of collected which for me I just kind of walked my dog and I was like like taking little notes for about a couple of weeks that's how long I gave myself to prepare I think one weekend or maybe two weekends if you could buy that type of time would be a great amount of time to prep and I'm not talking like 247 but like a few hours a day thinking about your

stories writing them down you should spend about half your time thinking brainstorming writing them down uh in maybe the form of bullets in an action and result format and then about half your time rehearsing really rehearse and you can iterate while you're rehearsing and while you're rehearsing you'll be reminded of these fun little details which is really valuable on the day of whenever I made my notes the way I did it was I really just focused on the action and the result for each story I would just have bullets and each bullet would be labeled

a for action or R for result uh because that was the part that was important if I looked at the action and the result in my notes I was I usually remember the context of the situation and task and that was how I was able to respond use your own note taking format this isn't like the right note taking format this is just something that helped me answer the questions in an effective way I think if you really stick to the tips I've given you so far you'll be in a good spot here are just

some final tips and tricks that I can think of that were useful to me or I've heard other people use on the day of the interview obviously one of the main things that anybody can do is like Stress Management so eat sleep breathe slowly pause it is okay if somebody asks you a question and you have a brain fart and you can't think of a story you're an answer just say you know I'm sorry I can't think of an answer right now like there's usually no points taken off as long as you don't obviously have

no answer for like five questions in a row but you have one question in every interview that you don't have an answer I think that's that seems totally reasonable um these are pretty challenging uh questions that require a lot a lot of cognitive function and and and capability again practice that storytelling really practice it say it verbally lock yourself in a room talking to a miror I don't know however it works for you record yourself dry run it with people that you trust but you really need to practice telling those stories there are great folks

on YouTube I really like a gentleman named Dan CER on YouTube he helped me that's who I watched whenever I was interviewing his tips were great so check out his channel as well one final thing that I think is always useful is you know as you're writing down your stories and reflecting on critical moments and things you're proud of in your career and writing them down think about how you've improved since then and maybe even things that you've learned from those stories maybe you applied lessons from those stories later maybe you learned something and made

an asset or a document or a Blog to teach other people I think when you can give instances not of just how you exhibited leadership principles and the results that you personally achieve but also when you can take it one step further and give perspectives of how you scaled that impact throughout your organization or your customers is always uh promising because as you kind of climb the ladder at Amazon the this idea of scale becomes very important and especially if you're interviewing for a more senior level role you might want to emphasize even more that

kind of scaling part of the results and the actions that you took whenever you're telling your stories because as a leader as an ultra senior employee yes you're expected to execute in the field but you're also expected to scale what you're doing and what you learn across the organization and across your direct reports wow I talked a lot I hope all of that was coherent and made sense if it didn't throw some questions in the comments I would be happy to make a short video clarifying this stuff if this was useful let me know please

if you use these tips and it helps you secure a job at Amazon amazing uh please let me know I'd love to hear from you and give you a big congratulations and until next time take it easy bye