How To Ace Amazon Behavioral Interview Questions [UPDATED 2024]
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It’s no secret that landing a job at one of the large IT firms may be difficult. Interviews at businesses like Google, Facebook, and Amazon have become almost as well-known as the company themselves.
Applicants for positions at Amazon should expect to be given a series of questions known as behavioral interview questions. Amazon places a high value on these questions for candidates because they place a high value on their recruiting process and the people they hire. “I’d rather interview 50 candidates and not employ anyone than hire the wrong person,” Jeff Bezos famously stated.
As a result, the company relies extensively on these sorts of inquiries to determine if you’re a good fit for the position. These may be tough to improvise on the fly, so it’s best to plan for them ahead of time. This essay will help you in doing so.
What are Amazon behavioral interview questions?
Behavioral interview questions focus on how you’ve handled various working circumstances and show your character characteristics, talents, and skills. These questions offer an interviewer an indication of how you would act in a similar scenario, with the reasoning being that your success in the past would predict your success in the future. Unlike standard interview questions, behavioral job interview approaches seek tangible examples of relevant abilities and experiences. Your responses to these questions should include a concise narrative that highlights your abilities and qualities as an employee.
Focusing on the bright side, there is a strategy that was in place due to professionals in the field in order to crack the code of any interview question, especially Amazon interview questions. The strategy is STAR.
STAR is an abbreviation that stands for Situation: Set the setting and offer your sample facts. Task: Explain what your role was in the circumstance. Action: Describe the measures you took to address it. Result: Describe the results of your activities.
So if your interviewer, for example, should say:
Tell me about the moment you had to decide to sacrifice short-term rewards for a long period.
We recommend that you utilize the STAR technique for maximizing your response without wandering or confusing replies. So you’d start by outlining briefly the circumstance where such a judgment has to be in place. What the background was, how would you know to decide, etc?
Prepare the need to tasks to make short-term sacrifices, the steps you have taken to complete these tasks, and ultimately the outcomes, notably those for the long-term advantages in this situation.
Now, what is the behavioral answer for this question?
Here’s an example answer to “Tell me about a time you’ve made a mistake,” a representative of the Exponent community offered.
- Situation: Let me tell you about a time when I managed to exhibit a website that suddenly performed slowly and that the mistake on our side was misunderstood until a user told management about the issue. As a PM in this project, I took on all responsibilities and worked with the technical team to address the problem at once.
- Tasks: Also to the feature development and adoption, which I spent most of my time in, this error showed me the necessity of concentrating and monitoring non-functional needs.
- Action: Once the fast solution is in place, I guarantee that such an error occurs, putting in place a proper application administration interface and setting up to receive email notifications and need to Pagerduty warnings if website conduct exceeds certain limits. Personally, I also tried to master the program to evaluate prior problems and to call technical areas for optimization.
- Result: We can exhibit continuous load times less than 3s with this effort. I have also shared my lessons in a brown bag session with other PMs in my team to benefit too.
Your interviewer will discover a lot about you in a short amount of time using this approach. Conduct questions can frequently be addressed in situations that may be highly complicated, subtle, or need to be thoroughly clearin a particular context. But the STAR technique does not require you to worry that the interviewer has to miss anything significant or waste his time with a long answer.
Principles of Amazon Leadership
Your interviewer will be especially attentive to how your responses connecting with the Amazon Leadership Principles in the conduct phase of the interview. Amazon is well-known for its rigorous adherence to its CEO Jeff Bezos’ management philosophies. One is the renowned “Day 1” mindset which certainly played a large part in the huge success of Amazon. But Day 1 isn’t Amazon’s only tenant precious to him. The firm itself has 14 principles of leadership that should be respected by its employees and the company itself.
Amazon’s Leadership Principles are the following:
- Obsession of Customers
- Ownership
- Simplify and invent
- Right, so much.
- Be Cautious and Learn
- Recruiting and making the best
- Hold on to the highest standards
- Think of the great
- Action Bias
- Frugality
- Gain confidence
- Deep Diving
- Dispute and commit Have Backbone;
- Providing results
Of course, your interviewer will be attentively listening to instances about previous performance in answer to your queries of behavior, and how they show these characteristics of leadership. The hypercompetitive and frequently cutthroat culture of Amazon is well-known. As such, behavioral issues may be more important in an Amazon interview than in other businesses. This is even more reason for getting ready for them in advance.
John Rossman authored a very instructive book, explaining in depth the significance of each leadership principle and why it is vital for the philosophy of Amazon’s company. Read this and your interviewer should not have an issue with your thorough knowledge of the concepts of leadership.
Be aware that the interviewer may even ask you to repeat the principles of leadership. You should so not just prepare for your behavioral answers, but solely in the event that you get the pop testing “Please repeat the principles of Amazon leadership.”
Amazon behavioral interview questions examples
Here is a list of Amazon behavioural interview questions that you might have during the interview. Besides, take into account the fact that these Amazon behavioral interview questions are aiming to reveal the hidden aspects of your personality and work ethics.
- Tell me about a moment when you had to abandon a project.
- Give me two instances of times when you went above and beyond the call of duty in previous employment.
- Give me an example of a moment when you took a calculated risk.
- Tell me about your most cherished professional accomplishment.
- Tell me about a moment when you had to abandon a project.
- Tell me about a moment when you had to deal with data or information that was incomplete.
- Tell me about a moment when just asking questions affected a change.
- Tell me about a moment when you came up with a novel idea.
- Tell me about an instance when your knowledge or observation helped you overcome an issue.
- Give me two instances of times when you went above and beyond the call of duty in previous employment.
- Tell me about a moment when you had to cope with a situation that was ambiguous.
- Please tell me about a moment when you had to deal with a crisis.
- Tell me about a moment when you had to make a split-second choice that had a big influence on the company.
- Tell me about a time when you were in a group disagreement and how you dealt with it.
- Tell me about a time when you had a direct effect on a customer’s pleasure.
Pro Tips for a successful Amazon interview
It’s important to understand that, unlike other questions, there are no correct solutions. That is because it bases on your unique experiences, there might be a plethora of correct responses. But, there are a few pointers you should bear in mind to guarantee a successful interview.
Conduct research:
To begin, investigate the overall breadth of the behavioral questions you may have, we have mentioned that above. While you’ll never know precisely what questions you’ll have, the questions on this list should give you a fair sense of what to expect.
Brainstorm any possible situation:
You should think of scenarios from your past experiences that you may use to answer these questions. You may have a decent idea of what responses employers are searching for if you go through our list of behavioral interview questions. Furthermore, you may use it as a jumping-off point for your thinking.
Write a situation down and bring them to life:
After you’ve come up with a list of relevant job experiences, write them down and flesh them out, so you don’t forget important facts during the interview. Make careful to write them down using the STAR technique to ensure that your responses are both succinct and comprehensive.
Be aware of the position you are applying for:
Given Amazon’s well-known rigorous recruiting criteria, you should conduct as much research as possible on the position you’re applying for, as well as the work that the role’s department/team really accomplishes. Your interviewer will almost certainly ask you questions to see if you’re a good match for the company’s culture, and your preparation will only help you create the best possible impression. Furthermore, your study into the function you’re looking for might offer you a solid idea of the behavioral abilities need to for the position. As a result, you’ll have a decent sense of the behavioral questions they’ll ask about those talents.
As we have mentioned before, every single question of these Amazon behavioral interview questions is carefully handpicked by professional hiring managers who have been years in the field. True, Amazon behavioral interview questions are difficult to pass taking into consideration the fact that we are talking about one of the biggest companies on earth. Luckily for you, we got your back.
we put our pride to represent the breakthrough interview application, Huru. Huru is an AI-based application that uses smart algorithms in order to provide you with thousands of simulated interviews, analyses, reports, and much more. The reason behind Huru’s mock interviews is to reveal your interview mistakes and guide you into fixing them right away.
Huru is your personal coach to Amazon behavioral interview questions.
Elias Oconnor
Senior Copywriter
