Amazon has over 1 million temporary and permanent employees worldwide, according to its latest earnings report, and is looking to hire at least 26,821 more full-time workers.
But while vacancies at the e-commerce giant are plentiful, you still have to pass a rigorous application process for a full-time role.
Amazon recruiters focus as much on traits as skills, quizzing applicants for their capacity to demonstrate Amazon's 14 core leadership principles via behavioral interview questions.
Business Insider spoke with Tom Lawrance, a former MBA recruiter and interviewer trainer for Amazon in Europe, on how to best answer these types of interview questions and get hired.
Lawrance worked for the e-commerce giant for 11 years. He started his career as a senior marketing manager and then spent his last three years as a senior MBA recruiter.
He now heads up the global industry careers team at Oxford University's Saïd Business School and coaches MBA students for roles at Amazon.
Here's the technique Lawrance suggests that candidates and his MBA students use to nail Amazon's interviews.
Practice with the 'CAR' format
Amazon outlines the 14 leadership principles it's looking for in candidates on its site — so an obvious first tip is to review the hiring website.
Recruiters will tease out whether candidates have these qualities through behavioral interview questions.
These are open-ended, with language like "tell me about a time when you ..." The idea is to open the door for a candidate to show how, in particular situations, they demonstrated any of the 14 leadership principles.
Conventionally, candidates are often advised to use the "STAR" method to answer these questions.
STAR stands for situation, task, action, result, and is a method to structure your answer in a way that best demonstrates your skills or achievements in a particular scenario.
Lawrance has come up with a simple tweak, the "CAR" format.
The CAR technique stands for context, action, results. It's about describing the context, the actions you took, and the specific results, Lawrance said.
"It is just simpler, to be honest ... With the STAR format, I have seen this blurred the lines between the situation and the task," he said. "Those are just a little bit more open to interpretation, and in my experience, if you do kind of boil it down into just simply context, then it is often easier for candidates to understand what they need to give."
It's a small change and still involves describing a context where a candidate demonstrated one of the leadership principles, Lawrance said.
Here's what you might say using the STAR method:
- Situation: While developing a new system for my current company, a requirement came in late. Since the project was rapidly nearing completion, integrating the feature became a challenge.
- Task: The point in development where it would have typically been addressed had already passed, so I needed to act fast.
And here's how you might streamline your answer by rolling the two elements together with the CAR method:
- Context: While developing a new system for my current company, a requirement came in late. Since the project was rapidly nearing completion, integrating the feature became a challenge. The point in development where it would have typically been addressed had already passed, so I needed to act fast.
"I see candidates get bogged down trying to get a clear definition of a situation and a task, and because all answers are unique to the individual, you can't always say which is 'situation' and which is 'task' — actually they're all part of Context anyway," Lawrance said.
Recruiters will be looking for data-based answers to demonstrate the impact, such as numbers or tangible evidence. Candidates should use the latter to articulate "how they knew they did the right thing ... the reason why but also what their measure of a good result was," he added.
Recruiters, he said, will also check for more detail because they are "trained to dig into the detail and to probe further."
"They call it 'peeling the onion' in the training that is given to interview. ... It's all about going through layers to understand what that person actually did and the decisions that went into it," he said.
