Hire and Develop the Best: Amazon Interview Questions
Hire and Develop the Best is one of Amazon's leadership principles. Amazon's wording: "Leaders raise the performance bar with every hire and promotion. They recognize exceptional talent, and willingly move them throughout the organization. Leaders develop leaders and take seriously their role in coaching others. We work on behalf of our people to invent mechanisms for development like Career Choice."
What is Hire and Develop the Best?
The obvious reading is about managers: hire people better than yourself, promote carefully, coach deliberately. But Amazon probes this principle with individual contributors too, because "developing others" is not a management activity there. Mentoring an intern, onboarding a new teammate properly, writing the doc that levels up the whole team, raising the bar in interviews you sit in as a peer: all of it counts.
The phrase "raise the bar with every hire" is also literal. Amazon staffs a Bar Raiser into every interview loop, an interviewer whose explicit job is to reject candidates who would not raise the team's average.
What interviewers look for
- A concrete person you developed and what changed for them because of you.
- A high hiring bar you personally enforced, even when the team was desperate to fill the seat.
- Talent generosity: you helped a strong person move on or up, even though losing them hurt your team.
Hire and Develop the Best interview 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.
How to answer
Name the mechanism, not just the intention. "I mentored juniors" is a job description; "I ran a weekly review of her design docs for three months, and by Q3 she led the migration herself" is a story. Use STAR, keep yourself in the supporting role (the developed person is the hero), and if you have a hiring story, show the standard you refused to lower and what it cost you short-term.
Every principle interviews better with a prepared example: our story bank guide shows how to build one, and the Amazon Leadership Principles guide covers the rest of the list. Want practice against someone who has run these loops? Get matched with a coach.