Acing the Amazon Written Assessment Top Tips

During my time at Amazon, I conducted hundreds of interviews. I loved hearing stories from people wanting to join Amazon – some were so memorable I can still recall them 5 years later. Others, I remember for all the wrong reasons (spoiler: best not to tell your interviewer you lied to a client to win a deal!)

When applying for more senior level jobs, in addition to the phone screens and in-person interviews, you can also be asked to submit a written assessment. This is read by the interviewers ahead of the debrief, and forms part of the overall decision. Amazon has a strong writing culture and they want to make sure that leaders joining the company can also write well. As a Bar Raiser, I started to really think about what made a great interview answer, verbally and when written down.

Now I have left Amazon, I stay connected to Amazon interviewing through Day One Careers, coaching those wanting to join Amazon on interview best practices as well as providing coaching and reviews of written assessments. I love reading these written examples, and candidates tell me it is often the first time they have written a long-form narrative since college!

So what makes a great written assessment?

It is all about the story. Great stories have a start, a middle, and an end. They lead the reader through the trials and tribulations, providing just the right amount of detail to build suspense and intrigue. And that is what you need for a great written assessment too!

You need to set the scene. Tell your reader a little about the status quo. Introduce your reader to the essentials so they have an idea where you are in your story. Then write about the problem, your idea and how you got started. This should be covered in a couple of paragraphs. Most of your writing should focus on what you did. What did you do to solve the problem? What were the trials and tribulations? How did you know you were doing the right thing? How did you know it was going to meet your customer's expectations?

Then it's results time! Far too often I see people run out of steam and summarise poorly. This should be your heralding trumpet solo announcing what you delivered! GO BIG! Talk about the results (not just that you launched a thing), but the impact your result had, including what you learned from it.

Here are my top tips for nailing the Amazon written assessment:

1. Paint the “before picture” – often candidates jump straight into what they did, but without context your reader will be thinking “so what?!”
2. Find the right level of detail – details matter but think about the right level for your reader. Details help your reader understand just how much you were involved (but too much can confuse your reader!) If in doubt, share your doc with a friend and ask if they could understand it, or better still book a review with me through Day One Careers!
3. Data data data! – Amazon loves data. Amazon interviewers love hearing and reading about data. Weaving in data points (for the before and after) helps to accentuate not only the impact, but also the fact that you are a data driven person.
4. Focus on the IMPACT – What did your work actually deliver? How did it benefit your customer? Did it meet or even exceed the goals? What did you learn from this experience?
5. And finally...CHECK YOUR SPELLING!