I applied to multiple positions at Amazon throughout my time in business school through the school's career management portal. I finally received an invite for a role within a fast growing division at the company.
1st Round: Hiring Manager (Director) discussed background and experience including prior roles at Amazon. Then transitioned to detailing current team and objective. This description was highly insightful and I recommend taking very detailed notes as it will help you prepare for later rounds. The interviewer then transitioned to describing the role (new position) they were hiring for and expectations for a successful candidate. Interviewer then opened for questions. This was followed by a competency based interview using the Adler "ONE QUESTION INTERVIEW METHOD" If you are not familiar with this format do yourself a favor and look it up. It is a variation of the typical Competency Behavioral Question, but requires a much deeper story than standard STAR response as it dives deep during follow-up questions. There was no typical walk me through your resume portion.
Initial Question: What do you consider your most impactful piece of work and why?
Follow-up Questions: How did you come to work on this particular project? How did you go about coming up with the initial analysis and recommendation? What was the project/product lifecycle? What were some interesting facts that you learned from the data? Who else was working with you on your team, what was your role? How did you present your findings to senior leadership? What was their response? How did you overcome initial pushback? What initiative did you take during the process? What was the result of the project?
Interview concluded with typical question and answer round followed by a brief description of candidacy process. 1 more phone round, plus on-site loop and possible written case. Received 2nd round telephone invite 2 days later, scheduling process was similar to 1st round.
2nd Round: Team member (Product Manager). The call had barely begun and the interviewer jumped into case interview. He had to pause and rewind to introduce himself when he realized he had just jumped in head first. The case was a very typical "interviewer-led" consulting case, where the business problem was based on actual Amazon problem. If you don't know what this is you desperately need to pick up either "Case in Point" or "Case Interview Secrets" by Victor Cheng. The case started was mixed (40/60) qualitative/quantitative where interviewer expected you to identify need to do market segmentation, sizing, and P&L estimation. There were -a lot- of numbers and towards the end of the case I tripped up several times inverting several numbers and also saying some pretty dumb sounding things. A full quant case is hard enough in person doing it while on the phone was exceptionally difficult. At the end of the case the interviewer wrapped up by asking for a recommendation. When I had made the recommendation which I knew was correct, he asked me "ok, but how are we going to do that?" After a few generic answers didn't satisfy him it was clear he was looking for a specific answer. I happened to nail it just as his patience seemed to be waning. Case took about 35-40 mins. The interview concluded with about 5 mins of Q&A.
After 2nd Round I though I was toast. I had tripped up towards the end of the case, and the only thing I could hope for was that I had earned enough points early on in the case to pass, but wasn't sure where the bar had been set. On a consulting case interview scale of (1-10) this case was at or above 8. Similar to late round McK & Co.
To my relief I was invited for on-site the following morning.
For the details on travel etc you can read up other on-site experiences on glassdoor.com, mine was close to identical.
On-site 5 Interview as follows: Hiring Manager, Non-Team Member (Senior Product Manager), Team Member (Sr. Product Manager), Team Member (Principal Product Manager), Team Member who first interviewed me (Senior Product Manager).
All the interviews were competency based interviews. Most, if not all followed previously mentioned Adler method. The principle product manager gave me what I guess would be considered bar raiser interview. It started off really friendly and then he started to turn up the heat. A lot of push back after my responses. How would you market yourself as a product?
Finished with brief meeting with recruiting manager to discuss feedback, go over salary expectations, relocation package, questions/concerns etc. Hiring manager gave me an exact date for when my evaluation meeting would take place and promised to contact me with a decision either that same day of the meeting or the next day.
Recruiting manager called on exact date as promised.
