Strive to Be Earth's Best Employer: Amazon Interview Questions
Strive to Be Earth's Best Employer is one of the two leadership principles Amazon added in 2021. Amazon's wording: "Leaders work every day to create a safer, more productive, higher performing, more diverse, and more just work environment. They lead with empathy, have fun at work, and make it easy for others to have fun. Leaders ask themselves: Are my fellow employees growing? Are they empowered? Are they ready for what's next?"
What is Strive to Be Earth's Best Employer?
Where most principles are about the customer or the business, this one is about the people doing the work. It asks whether you make the environment around you safer, fairer, and better to work in: psychological safety in meetings, workload that does not burn people out, teammates who grow because you are there.
It shows up most in loops for managers and senior candidates, but individual contributors get it too, usually framed as team culture: what you did when the on-call rotation was crushing someone, or when a quiet teammate's ideas kept getting talked over.
What interviewers look for
- A concrete improvement to how your team worked: process, workload, safety, inclusion, with you as the initiator.
- Empathy with follow-through. Noticing someone struggling is the setup; what you changed for them is the story.
- Balance. Amazon pairs this with Deliver Results on purpose; caring for the team while missing every goal is not the principle.
Strive to Be Earth's Best Employer interview questions
- Tell me about a time you improved your team's working environment.
- Describe a time you noticed a colleague struggling. What did you do?
- How have you made a team more inclusive? Give a specific example.
- Tell me about a time you protected your team from burnout while still delivering.
- Describe a conflict on your team and how you helped resolve it.
- What have you done to make work more enjoyable for the people around you?
- Tell me about a time you advocated for someone who wasn't being heard.
How to answer
Pick a story where you changed a system, not just comforted a person: rebalanced an on-call, restructured a meeting so quieter people got airtime, made an unfair process fair. Use STAR and, because this principle deliberately coexists with Deliver Results, end with the performance outcome: the team got healthier AND the numbers held or improved.
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.