The 3 Candidates I Always Rejected as a Bar Raiser at Amazon
Jeff Bezos created the bar. Even his personal referral couldn't clear it.
In the early days of Amazon, Jeff Bezos referred someone for a senior leadership position.
The team interviewed him, but he didn’t clear the bar, and now the team had to go tell Jeff.
Nervous about the conversation, the interviewing team wrote a six-page memo. They gave it the whole Amazon treatment, including every interview signal, every data point, and the full reasoning behind why the person he had referred wasn’t getting hired. Their reasons were strong, but this was Jeff, so they walked in and braced themselves for significant pushback.
His response, before he’d even seen the document?
“Okay.”
I heard this story during my training to be a Bar Raiser. At least, this is how I remember it being told. It was passed down to every new Bar Raiser, and once you understand why, the Amazon hiring system makes a lot more sense.
Jeff built the Bar Raiser program on purpose. He wanted a mechanism that allowed a trained interviewer from outside the hiring team, wit…
