Don't fake it, just be yourself; Amazon CEO's tips to crack job interview

In a fireside chat at LinkedIn's Career Day event, Andy Jassy says Amazon is an unusual place to build a career. It's an amazing place if you want to have an impact on the world

For people who like to have an impact on the world, then it's hard to find a place that's more exciting to work than Amazon, says Andy Jassy, the CEO of the world’s largest online retailer as advice for young professionals thinking about new career opportunities.

“So we hope a lot of the people who are thinking about new opportunities will think about Amazon,” says Jassy, during a fireside chat with Devin Banerjee, Editor at Large for Business & Finance at LinkedIn at the firm’s Career Day event. Amazon was also hosting the company’s first-ever Career Day in India on Thursday. The virtual event brought together Amazon leadership and employees to share what makes Amazon an exciting workplace.

In India Amazon is currently hiring for more than 8,000 direct job openings across 35 cities in the country, including cities like Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Chennai, Gurgaon, and Mumbai. The other cities include Kolkata, Noida, Amritsar, Ahmedabad, Bhopal, Coimbatore, Jaipur, Kanpur, Ludhiana, Pune, and Surat. These job opportunities are spread across corporate, technology, customer service, and operations roles.

“I think you want to pick a company that has some impact on the world, and that is growing, and whose future growth prospects are promising, and where you could imagine building a long career,” says Jassy. “We feel at Amazon, it's a pretty unusual place to build a career. It's an amazing place if you want to have an impact on the world.”

Looking at Amazon in the first 25-27 years, Jassy says the firm has been inventing and changing customers' lives every day in lots of different areas. It is also growing at a very rapid rate. Globally the company is hiring 55,000 technical and corporate employees. It is going to add another 125,000 employees to its fulfilment centre network. These roles are spread across a broad array of functions, ranging from software development engineers, product managers, marketing, to machine learning and AI practitioners and research scientists.

“It is a very early stage in the history of Amazon,” says Jassy.

Jassy may have interviewed hundreds, probably thousands of job candidates through his different roles at Amazon. When asked what advice he would give anyone wanting to make a great impression in a job interview, Jassy says “the first thing is just to be yourself.”

“At the end of the day, you want to work at a company that values you for who you are. If you fake it in the interview and get the job, then you end up either having to continue to fake it or people don't know who you are and don't appreciate that,” says Jassy. “You're not going to be happy. So really be who you are and see if there's a fit. The second general thing I'd say is to answer the questions. A lot of times when we all sit in interviews where a question is asked, and instead of just directly answering the question and elaborating further, people will spend 5-10 minutes (warm-up) and then sometimes get lost and never get to the answer.”

Jassy says Amazon is looking for people who are really passionate about customers. They need to think about what customers care about and build experiences that they want. The firm is also looking for people who are inventive and creative and can exhibit that both with respect to what they have done in the past, but also in the way they answer questions, especially open-ended questions.

“We like people who are strategic and can see the big picture, but who also are passionate about the details,” says Jassy.

What Jassy has learnt at Amazon is that all the best ideas that are talked about are put on a whiteboard and where the rubber meets the road, are the details. This applies from the senior-most levels at Amazon, all the way to the junior-most roles. The firm is also looking for people who have high standards.

“I think customers today with their access to information and choices appropriately have very high standards,” says Jassy. “We like people who I would say are more missionary than mercenary. We want people who care most about the mission of the team and the company. They put the goals and the mission above the goals of themselves.”

Jassy had joined the e-commerce giant 24 years fresh out of graduate school. An alumnus of Harvard University, Jassy was from the East Coast and his fiance, who is now his wife, was from the West Coast in the US. He had agreed to move to the West Coast for three years, as long as she agreed that they would go back to New York, where he grew up. After taking his final exam in May 1997, Jassy joined Amazon as part of the 8 people marketing group. Here all the roles were too big for them. In the beginning, he was told to lead competitive intelligence and customer retention for the e-commerce firm.

He was later asked to work on a project where the company explored other product categories Amazon should consider getting into besides books. He looked at areas such as music, videos and software. It made more sense that time to build those categories instead of buying them. Jassy then went back to build customer relationships and marketing team and also led the product management, music business and marketing. After that, an unusual role came to Jassy, which was “shadowing” Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.

Jassy left the “shadow job” in the fall of 2003 to explore whether there might be a business of building a set of infrastructure services. This could comprise a technology infrastructure platform where developers and companies could build their applications. Later that business became the cloud computing business Amazon Web Services (AWS). Jassy took over founder Jeff Bezos’ role in July this year.

Is it helpful to have a college degree? “I think, yes,” says Jassy. Do you have to have a college degree to have a successful career? “No. And we're really proud of how many opportunities we have for people of all backgrounds and all educational backgrounds too,” says Jassy. “And we have a lot of jobs, particularly in our fulfilment centres, where you don't need a college degree. These are good, solid jobs that we pioneered moving the minimum wage to over $15 today. Our starting hourly wage is $18.32.”

But it's not just the competitive compensation. Jassy says the company has a set of benefits that one can’t find at most companies. This includes full health insurance and 20 weeks of parental leave. “When you come back after that, if you want to ramp up, you can have eight weeks of working half the time,” says Jassy. Amazon has also enhanced its Career Choice program where people who are at a Fulfillment Center place can have their full college tuition paid for. They also have the ability to get ongoing education every year and to learn new skills.