Process driven nonsense. Like being interviewed by Alexa. One of Amazon's claimed values is humility. Everyone is supposed to be humble and respectful of others. That was not what I found. My personal opinion of interviews is that they are as much about you qualifying the employer as they are about them qualifying you as an employee, but that's not Amazon's approach. Instead of a two way process where you can be authentic and let your strengths and personality come forward, you are forced in to an unnatural and painful conversation. Amazon uses behavioural style questioning in their interviews and I knew that there would be some of this. But I wasn't prepared for the interviews to be 100% behavioural questions; 'What would you do if...' 'Describe a time when...' There were 5 interviews each lasting 45 minutes, plus a 60 minute panel presentation. There was zero conversation or getting to know each other, just questions read from a screen. As a candidate and potential future employee I did not get anything back from the interviewers to allow me to get a better feel for whether or not I wanted to work at AWS. At the mid point of the day I was so unimpressed that I almost pulled out, but as I had come this far I decided to see it through. I told my next interviewer that I felt like the process was a little 'one way' and his response was 'If you have done your research then you'll know all you need to know about whether you want to work here or not'. If Amazon wants me to base my impression of them on internet based research and the glossy YouTube videos put together by marketing, then they can base their decision on my LinkedIn profile. But of course they won't do that, so why should I? Their arrogant, robotic, overly structured process gives a candidate absolutely no opportunity to get a feel for the place or for their culture, and in my case it totally put me off and there was no way I would have moved from my current role to AWS, based on this terrible interview experience. If you are a seasoned sales professional from IBM, SAP, Oracle, Salesforce, Microsoft etc. then AWS probably isn't for you. If you are a process driven robot devoid of personality, then you'll fit right in!

It took several weeks for the first phone interview to get scheduled. The person conducting the interview was in Central America and was not going to be part of the team and was asked to do the interview. Very little feedback or communication throughout the process.