Amazon looks at more online recruitment

The personnel at the US-headquartered giant are around 25,000 in India and growing at about 25% yearly

Online marketplace Amazon says it is looking at converting a large part of its campus recruitment interviews into online tests, to save time and cost for both it and the candidates.

From last year, it has while recruiting interns reduced the number of interviews from around four to one. The personnel at the US-headquartered giant is around 25,000 in India and has been growing at about 25 per cent yearly. This pace is expected to continue fro now, said Raj Raghavan, director, human resource.

“In our campus hiring, we are trying to use a lot more online assessments. That is a big leap. In intern hiring, we are eliminating a number of interviews and everything gets tested online,” he said. “We will probably also do (predominantly) online assessment in campus recruitment.”

It hires people with skills in mobile use, cloud computing, machine learning and data analytics, among others. A large number of characteristics can be be tested online, said Raghavan, for which a student might otherwise need to spend an hour with an interviewer.

Earlier, technical assessments were mostly done online. Now, many non-technical assessments can be done the same way. Writing skills, for instance. For campus recruitements, it needs to perfect the process and technology, and make sure the colleges in question have the needed infrastructure.

“We want to be at a stage when all our entry-level technology hiring happens from campuses. Which means we need to work with technology, schools a lot closer,” he said.