To make sure you never miss out on your favourite NEW stories, we're happy to send you some reminders

Click 'OK' then 'Allow' to enable notifications

Jeff Bezos hired Amazon employee ‘on the spot’ after they successfully answered his two most important interview questions
Featured Image Credit: Karwai Tang/WireImage/ John Keeble/Getty Images

Jeff Bezos hired Amazon employee ‘on the spot’ after they successfully answered his two most important interview questions

One of the questions was pretty out there

An Amazon employee recalled the gruelling interview process they had to go through before finally meeting Jeff Bezos.

While Ann Hiatt went on to pave a successful career for herself, there was a time she wasn't hopeful about her jobs prospects.

After graduating from the University of Washington in 2002, Hiatt found that many of her classmates were struggling to find jobs.

With this in mind, she decided to open up her mind to potentially going into a profession she didn't expect she'd try - tech.

Hiatt had no experience as an assistant, but took the plunge and applied for a role at Amazon as Bezos' junior assistant.

Despite her lack of experience, Hiatt got a callback from the company and was invited in for an interview.

She described the initial interviews as 'dizzying' as she had 'back-to-back interviews with all of the senior assistants, some of them lasting all day'.

Luckily the hours she'd put in paid off and Hiatt went on to make it to the final interview stage. However, the recruiter failed to mention that it would be with Bezos himself.

While many would expect to be grilled by their potential new boss, Bezos simply asked Hiatt two questions.

"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," she penned in a CNBC article.

Jeff Bezos asked just two questions in Ann Hiatt's final interview.
Karwai Tang/WireImage

For the first question, Hiatt had to estimate the number of panes of glass in the city of Seattle.

Urm, what?

Hiatt admitted she was 'terrified' by the question at first, but quickly put her thinking cap on did some calculations.

Explaining how she came to her answer, she wrote: "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."

After 10 minutes of maths, Hiatt presented her estimate to Bezos.

"That looks about right," he told her at the time, evidently pleased with her answer.

Now, for the second question, the business mogul asked Hiatt about her career goals.

Hiatt went on to become an Executive Business Partner at Amazon.
Instagram/@annhiatt

"I told him that Amazon had proven to be a company full of ambitious and passionate people," Hiatt recalled.

"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."

Following her successful answers, Hiatt was hired 'on the spot' and the rest was history.

Starting off as a junior assistant, she continued to work closely with Bezos during her time at Amazon and eventually became one of his Executive Business Partners.

Impressive!

Topics: News, Business, Amazon, Jeff Bezos, Life, Technology