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Hire and Develop the Best: Amazon Interview Questions

Hire and Develop the Best is the sixth of Amazon's 16 leadership principles. The obvious reading is for managers: hire people better than yourself, promote carefully, coach deliberately. But Amazon tests it with individual contributors too, because at Amazon developing other people is not a management activity. Mentoring an intern, onboarding a new teammate properly, writing the document that levels up the whole team, holding the bar in an interview you sit in as a peer: all of it counts.

This guide covers the official wording, what the principle means in practice for managers and for individual contributors, examples at work, 14 interview questions, a sample STAR answer, and the follow-ups an Amazon interviewer will ask.

The official wording from Amazon

Leaders raise the performance bar with every hire and promotion.

That is the opening on Amazon's leadership principles page. The rest of the text adds three more expectations: leaders recognize exceptional talent and willingly move it around the company, they develop other leaders and take coaching seriously, and the company builds mechanisms for development (Amazon names its Career Choice program as an example). "Raise the bar with every hire" is also literal: Amazon staffs a Bar Raiser into every interview loop, an interviewer from outside the hiring team whose explicit job is to reject candidates who would not lift the team's average.

What Hire and Develop the Best means in practice

You can name a specific person who is better at their job because of something you did, and say what changed for them.
You hold the hiring bar when the team is desperate to fill the seat, and you can describe a candidate you turned down and why.
You give difficult feedback directly, early and privately, and you follow up.
You help strong people move on or up, even when losing them hurts your team.
You build mechanisms, not just moments: an onboarding plan, a review rotation, a mentoring pairing that outlives you.

Hire and Develop the Best examples at work

A senior engineer reviews a new graduate's design document every week for a quarter. Each review she asks one question instead of giving the answer. By the end of the quarter the graduate leads a migration on his own, and the weekly review becomes the team's standard for anyone in their first six months.

An engineering manager interviews a candidate the whole panel likes. The candidate is strong on coding and weak on the one thing the team is short of, which is operating systems in production. She says no, explains the gap in the debrief, and the seat stays open another six weeks. The eventual hire is still on the team four years later.

A product lead notices that one of her product managers is outgrowing the team. She introduces him to a director with a bigger problem, helps him prepare, and loses her best PM to another org. Her team is weaker for a quarter; the company is stronger for years.

A customer support team lead builds a two-week onboarding plan with daily check-ins after noticing new hires take three months to reach the team's average handle time. New hires reach it in five weeks.

Hire and Develop the Best interview questions

Direct questions

Tell me about someone you mentored. Where were they when you started, and where are they now?
Describe a time you helped a struggling teammate improve.
Have you ever recommended rejecting a candidate everyone else liked? Why?
Tell me about a time you gave difficult feedback to someone you managed or worked with.
How have you raised the quality bar on a team you joined?
Describe a time you lost a strong team member because it was the right move for them. How did you handle it?
What do you do to make new joiners productive quickly? Give a real example.

Questions that test it indirectly

Tell me about the best hire you ever made. What did you see that others did not?
Describe a hiring mistake. What did you learn, and what do you do differently now?
Tell me about a time you had to manage someone out, or recommend it.
How do you decide whom to promote? Walk me through a real decision.
Tell me about a time you delegated something you would rather have done yourself.
What do you look for in an interview that is not on the job description?
Tell me about a time you invested in someone and it did not pay off.

A sample STAR answer

Question: "Describe a time you helped a struggling teammate improve."

Situation: On a data engineering team I led, one engineer, two years in, was missing deadlines and getting pull requests sent back three or four times. Two senior engineers had quietly started routing work around him.

Task: My options were to manage him out or to find out whether the problem was skill, clarity or confidence. I owed him a real answer before I made that call.

Action: I paired with him for a week on his actual tickets. The pattern was clear in two days: he understood the code well but had never been taught to break a task down, so he started every ticket from the hardest part and ran out of time. We agreed on a four-week plan: every ticket started with a written five-line plan I reviewed in ten minutes, and he would ask for a review at the halfway point rather than the end. I also told the two seniors, privately, that routing around him stopped now and that I would own the outcome.

Result: By week four his review cycles dropped from three or four rounds to one, and he hit every deadline that quarter. Eight months later he was the engineer onboarding our next hire, using the same five-line plan. The seniors told me they had assumed he was not capable; what he lacked was a method and someone willing to spend a week finding that out.

Why this answer works

A specific person, a specific gap, and a mechanism (the five-line plan) rather than vague encouragement.
The candidate confronts the team dynamic rather than only the individual, which is what a leader does.
The result follows the developed person, not the manager, and the mechanism outlives the situation.

What the interviewer probes next

"What specifically did you do, as opposed to the person doing it themselves?" Keep yourself in the supporting role but be precise about your actions.
"How did you know the plan was working?" Have the measure: review rounds, deadlines, scope.
"What would you have done if it had not worked?" Interviewers want to hear that a limit existed.
"Tell me about the candidate you rejected. What did the team lose by waiting?" Show you understood the cost of holding the bar.
"Who have you developed who is now ahead of you?" The best answer to this principle is a name.

Common mistakes

Describing mentoring as a job title rather than a story. "I mentored juniors" is a job description.
Making yourself the hero. The person you developed is the hero; you are the mechanism.
Bringing only a hiring story, or only a development story. The principle has both halves, and senior candidates should expect both.
Telling a feedback story where the feedback was comfortable. Difficult feedback is the test.
Framing a strong person's departure as a loss you resisted rather than a move you enabled.

Related leadership principles

Insist on the Highest Standards: the hiring bar is a standard, and the candidate you turned down is a Highest Standards story too.
Earn Trust: difficult feedback given well is the most common Earn Trust story in a manager's loop.
Ownership: telling the seniors that routing around a colleague stops now, and owning the outcome, is Ownership of a team's health.

All 16 principles, with questions for each, are in the Amazon leadership principles guide.

Write up the people you have developed in your story bank, structure each with the STAR method, then get matched with a coach who has run hiring loops like Amazon's.