Interview - Driving Signals: Behavioral Practice
I’ll be referring to Amazon’s Leadership Principles (LPs) a lot from here. Familiarize yourself with them before proceeding:
www.amazon.jobs/content/en/our-workplace/leadership-principles
These LPs are not only useful for interviews at Amazon, but they more generally give you a way to check that your talking points cover the right subjects and topics. While not all LPs are relevant to early career folks, there are a few standout ones that you must prepare talking points for. I have selected a few early career (1 past internship) sample points for reference.
1. Ownership
- “I owned the full development cycle for a new integration between our alarm dashboards and slack that helped drive sales in AMER”
- “I developed a discord bot for sharing music among my friends. This bot grew in popularity and is now actively used by over 100 communities. I still receive and address bug reports to this day”
2. Learn and Be Curious
- “I challenged myself to participate in XYZ hackathon to get out of my comfort zone. I met new people to form a team, self-organized into a cohesive force, and leveraged each other’s past experiences - however limited - to come up with an LLM powered coffee bean recycler.”
3. Dive Deep
- “My music sharing discord bot had stuttering audio when streaming from YouTube. I took the time to diagnose the cause, studied solutions rooted in signal processing, and implemented a basic network prefetch and audio buffer to resolve the issue.”
4. Bias for Action
- “While onboarding to my previous company, much of the team-specific documentation was out of date. As I was curious about the material, I took the time to learn the reasons why the setup for XYZ was conducted as such. From this, I learned that there was a more up to date method which I explored and subsequently updated the onboarding docs on”
Note that for each above point, they don’t cleanly fit in just one category. Often, these points, which are based on your real experiences, fit into multiple buckets.
Take for instance the second point in #1. This point is primarily about ownership, but if the interviewer is pushing especially hard on diving deep and technical competency, you can bridge this point to 3 since they’re both about the same project. This gives the impression that the scope of your project encompasses multiple LPs which is almost always a good signal.
I would recommend you take the time to form at least 3 points per important LP, and acknowledge which secondary LPs it may fall under. This allows you to answer questions at a higher level than just the “what” or “how”, but also more easily helps you connect related points about the same LP, or conversely, different LPs covered by this same talking point.
If you haven't already, get familiar with the STAR answering format (Situation, Task, Action, Result) and start to reframe your answers to fit the mold. Getting used to this ahead of time, during your prep, will help ensure that you don't miss a critical piece when you're answering in a higher pressure situation (for example, it would be a fairly bad look if you spent time setting up and justifying work you've done to improve performance, going through the process and deep dives you've gone through, just to leave out the critical piece at the end - how much did performance improve?).
In my experience participating in behavioral interviews, the interviewer allows you to refer to your spreadsheet of LP notes more often than not. It makes sense - why would they test your memory instead of hearing what you have to say for yourself?
