Answering Tricks

10 tricks that help you prepare high impact answers for behavioral interview

Before preparing for any Behavioral interview, it is important to understand your own self. The only way to do so is by reflecting on your past experiences. While the rest of the pages guides you on how to prepare for Amazon behavior interview, follow steps can help you kickstart the process of preparation:

1. Write a summary of your experience, cover all aspects you know or can talk about in the interview

2. List down the activities you have done in the past, try and recollect even the minutest thing you have done in your previous jobs or in college, if you are a fresher

3. Once you have the list of activities, elaborate against each activity, such as, what was the activity, what was it done, what would have happened if you had not done it and so on

4. Now pick up any behavioral interview question and try to build an answer by using the STAR answers format

5. Read your answers multiple times and keep correcting them to add more value added responses

6. Record your answers and listen to them as you are listening to responses of an interviewee. Highlight areas where you would want to ask a question if you were an interviewer.

7. For each instance, create a set of probing questions and prepare answers for those probing questions

Key ingredients that adds weightage to your answers!

While preparing for the interview notes, if you can take care of the listed ingredients in your storyline, you will stand better chances to form clear and concise responses:

1. Understanding of your current role -Thorough understanding of the metric you currently work on. The upstream and downstream processes along with your role impacting the customers 

2. Only quantified information qualifies - As they say “If you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it”. Your answer must consist of numbers, metrics, percentages - the measurable aspects to establish your contribution to improvement

3. Only quantified information qualifies - As they say “If you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it”. Your answer must consist of numbers, metrics, percentages - the measurable aspects to establish your contribution to improvement

4. Long term scalable solutions - Amazon does not believe in short term solutions attained through stop-gap arrangements. It is important that your answer talks about the current solution that takes care of the same or similar repetitive problems. Hence, always think of how you can fix the upstream process to ensure that the problem is solved at root cause level.

5. ‘We’ is important but ‘I’ is what they want to hear - Amazon Interviewer certainly wants to know that you are a team player. However, they would like to know if you are the one who built that team or you are one who facilitated bringing multiple teams together to work on a certain problem

6. Team Work - Amazon has a business model that runs through multiple handoffs before a certain service or product is delivered to the customer. This is not my problem or this is not my scope of work. This kind of attitude does not work in Amazon because they want you to think like an owner of the organization. Hence, your answer should reflect things which you have done beyond your scope where you had to work with multiple stakeholders to drive the results

7. Trade-offs - A difficult one to answer, many candidates fail to understand this term and it’s usage. The interviewer wants to know what did you lose to gain something out of it and was your loss bigger than the gain you made

8. Vocally Self-Critical - In your examples, wherever possible, mention "what you did wrong" followed by "you were quick in realizing the mistake it" and "what actions did you take to correct it"

9. Recent is the best - Always talk about an example that is recent from your experience, even if it is not, say so! Also, mentioned the dates (timeframe) wherever possible. Interviews will like it when you are specific about the time

10. More the merrier - Always have more than one example for a question. If the interviewer finds an example not suitable, they may ask for another scenario

Thoroughly read each page of 16 leadership principles, use the STAR framework and incorporate the key ingredients mentioned in section above, to get the x-factor in your answers.

All the best for your behavioral interview!