Amazon Leadership Principle - Hire & Develop the Best

The Thought - “Leaders raise the performance bar with every hire and promotion. They recognize exceptional talent, and willingly move them throughout the organization. Leaders develop leaders and take seriously their role in coaching others. We work on behalf of our people to invent mechanisms for development like Career Choice”

What is “Hire and Develop the Best” at Amazon

Looking at hire and develop the best leadership principle into two parts, 1) Hire - Irrespective of the number of interviews they take, they will never hire a person just to fill an open position. Their rigorous interview process has an extremely high performance bar. They will not settle down unless they have found a super smart resource, 2) Develop the Best - Understanding that, it is easy for a new resource to get lost in the complexity of business, processes, tools, technologies etc., they ensure that they have strong guiding path for the new resource to adapt to the new working environment steadily and grow within.

Read the sections below to learn more on hire and develop the best.

Amazon Leadership Principle Hire and Develop talks about Investing in the right talent both at the time of hiring and once the employee is onboarded.

Hire and Develop the Best Amazon interview questions

• Have you ever contributed to the success of a team member ? How did you help? What was the outcome?

• An example, when you gave feedback to someone on their area of weakness? How was your assessment approach and how did you convey ?

• Did you help remote team members in developing their career (very relevant for someone managing remote teams or global teams)?

• Have you ever worked with a bottom performer in your team, what all did you consider to give constructive feedback? Did that person succeed ? 

• Do you conduct performance reviews? What all aspects do you consider? Talk about the challenges you faced in performance reviews?

Interviewers expectations from your answers on “Hire and Develop the Best”

• If you are appearing for an individual contributor role, then the interviewer is looking for your ability to think like leaders. One of the striking qualities of a good leader is helping others grow. Are you someone who exhibit the quality of helping others do well or grow.

• Apart from domain knowledge, are you a person who is likely to raise the performance bar, both in terms of work and in terms of developing people.

• Someone who does not over focus on weakness but is able to do a fair assessment of strengths of a team member and help them grow.

• Always available and willing to extend coaching and mentoring to contribute in continuous learning and development of individuals and teams.

Must have in your answers on “Hire and Develop the Best”

• Talk about what you look for in a person when you assess them for a role or for a task

• You use data points on performance, key strengths displayed in achievements and feedback from stakeholders a person has worked, to form a holistic view.

• How do you keep the various biases at bay when you work with a person?

• What are the various methods you use to ensure you and your teams performance bar is inching higher year on year?