Amazon employee shares insight into Jeff Bezos' intense 'Loop' interview process
Amazon's 'interview loop' is the challenging final round a candidate must complete before being offered a job.
Greg Harris
An Amazon employee is shedding light on the infamous ‘interview loop’, revealing just how intense it really is.
In case you haven’t heard of it, the Amazon interview loop is the intensive last round of the hiring process, consisting of 4-6 back-to-back interviews lasting 45-60 minutes that all take place in the same day.
The description on the Amazon Jobs website explains that candidates will meet individually with current employees, with each person assessing different aspects of the interviewee’s skills and experience to help provide a ‘well-rounded understanding’ of how they’d perform at Amazon.
The website says all candidates are ‘evaluated’ through the ‘lens’ of its Leadership Principles, with current staff seeking evidence of how you may have used these principles in previous roles.
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They also ask behavioral-based questions focusing on pinpointing ‘real examples from your past experiences’ to provide an understanding how each candidate approaches challenges, decisions, and work with others. One example on the site is, “Describe a time when you took a risk, made a mistake, or failed. What happened, and what did you learn from it?”
Someone who was successful has spoken out about how it works. An Amazon Australia employee who works in the retail team answered questions on Reddit about the interview loop, and as you can probably imagine, many Redditors wanted to know if it really is as tough as people say.
Redditor Unable_Star_2907 said the interview loop is ‘very intense’, going on to explain how the system works and it’s much more complicated than you may think.
They said: “20 min phone screen from HR. 1 hour video call with hiring manager Then The Loop, which is 5 hours of 1 on 1 interviews with 5 people.
“Of the 5 people in the loop, one person is “the bar raiser” they are meant to be harsher on the candidate and scrutinise them more.
“After the loop, the interviewers can submit inclined/strongly inclined, decline/strongly declined
“They then get in a room and discuss. The hiring manager and the bar raisers opinion are given more weight.
“A candidate needs all inclined from all 5 to get through.”
In a separate thread, a different Redditor said the whole thing left them feeling ‘drained’. They wrote: “I have never been in such an intense, monotonous, and dull interview process.”
They added: “My voice was literally going out at one point as I was expected to speak for 30-45 mins. Most interviewers only left me with 10min at the end for questions and I had way more questions to cover than the time allotted for.”
Meanwhile, a different Amazon employee gave further tips on how to be successful when interviewing for a job at the company. And yet, they didn’t make it sound easy. Similar to other accounts, Emily Murray said on Amazon’s website: “Although I’ve had job interviews before, none have been as rigorous, lengthy, or thorough as the ones I had at Amazon. The process consisted of phone interviews with the recruiter and hiring manager, before a five-hour interview loop which involved several interviewers from across the business.”
Murray emphasizes preparing examples from previous experience, asking the interviewer questions, shaping answers around the job description, using concrete data points to and demonstrate success.