An Amazon employee who faced her final round of interviews with the founder himself shared the unexpected questions he asked her.
Cover Image Source: Jeff Bezos attends the 10th Annual LACMA Art+Film Gala presented by Gucci at Los Angeles County Museum of Art on November 06, 2021 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Axelle/Bauer-Griffin/FilmMagic/GettyImages)
Sometimes, interviews turn out in such a way that even a simple question would leave us racking our brains for the right answer. Candidates have to contemplate their answers so well that it makes them a desirable prospect for recruiters. Ann Hiatt, a former Executive Business Partner to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, spilled the tea about Bezos’ way of interviewing. Currently, a leadership strategist, Hiatt explained in a 2021 article she wrote for CNBC’s Make It how she was directly interviewed by Bezos who was Amazon’s CEO back in 2002.
Image Source: Amazon.com founder and CEO Jeff Bezos presents the company’s first smartphone, the Fire Phone, on June 18, 2014 in Seattle, Washington. (Photo by David Ryder/Getty Images)
Though the tech industry didn’t particularly allure Hiatt, she tried out her luck with Amazon which was a budding e-commerce business then. Her resume was shortlisted for the role of junior assistant and Hiatt went through her initial rounds of interviews successfully. A few months after her initial rounds, the woman was called in for her final round of interviews. Little did she know that the final interview was with the CEO himself. While Hiatt was surprised about it, Bezos set the tone light by telling her that he only had two questions to ask her and that the first one was a “fun” brainteaser.
Representative Image Source: Pexels | Edmond Dantès
Standing next to a whiteboard, Bezos told Hiatt, “I’ll do the math. I want you to estimate the number of panes of glass in the city of Seattle.” While this question “terrified” the interviewee at first, she pondered over Bezos’ motivation to ask this. She realized that he wanted to test how her “mind worked” and how she could break down a huge problem into small steps. “I outlined how I would start with the number of people in Seattle, which I thankfully correctly guessed as around 1 million, just to make the math easier. Then I said that they would each have a home, a mode of transportation, and an office or school — all of which would have windows. So I suggested that we base the estimate on averages of those,” she wrote in her article.
It took over 10 minutes for Hiatt to guess the answer but when she did, Bezos was pleased and said, “That looks about right.” His second question was about Hiatt’s “career goals.” The candidate spoke about how she was inspired by the “ambitious and passionate” people of Amazon and wanted to be like them. Though she actually wanted to be a professor and had no experience in being an assistant, she wanted to get out of her comfort zone and jump into an “astronomical learning and growth curve.”
Representative Image Source: Pexels | Andrea Piacquadio
Hiatt had a clear understanding of what the then-CEO of Amazon expected from a junior assistant. “He was measuring my potential by asking questions that would explore whether I had the grit, courage and motivation to run at his pace and be brave enough to consistently jump with him and level up,” she highlighted. Turns out, Hiatt’s answers seemed so convincing to the Amazon founder that he hired her “on the spot.” She wanted to do anything to be successful though she was just applying for a junior role. She ended up working at a desk that was the closest to Bezos – just “three feet away” from him- and Hiatt was quite proud of it.a
