Amazon
Jeff Bezos asked his assistant these two questions during a job interview
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How do you get a job at Jeff Bezos? A former assistant reports that the Amazon founder only asked her two questions during the interview. But they had it all.
Working directly with one of the richest men in the world means good pay, an exciting job and the opportunity to learn a lot. However, such jobs are also very popular and difficult to get. Especially since successful entrepreneurs often make quite eccentric demands on their employees.
Ann Hiatt applied to be the assistant to Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, in 2002 – and got the job. In a post for CNBC, she explained how she convinced Bezos to hire her. Even though she had no experience in the tech business or relationships within the company. Two questions that Bezos asked her were decisive, she recalls.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos: Two questions decide in the interview
After several rounds in an assessment center, the final hurdle was the interview with the CEO himself. Bezos, now one of the richest people in the world, made short work of it. Immediately after entering the room, he announced that he would only ask the applicant two questions. The first: “I want you to appreciate how many panes of glass there are in Seattle.” Hiatt did not expect that – she was horrified, she writes.
But she tried to approach the question systematically: after all, she knew that this was exactly what Bezos was after. She first estimated the population of the city and then calculated the number of discs for their houses, cars, etc. Bezos wrote everything down on a whiteboard. They did the math back and forth for ten minutes, then, in the CEO’s opinion, the estimate roughly coincided with reality.
The second question was more personal: “What are your career goals?” Hiatt replied that like the other ambitious and passionate employees at Amazon, she wanted to become and learn from them. “I explained that I had no idea how to be an assistant, but that I knew the importance of constantly being outside of your comfort zone,” says Hiatt.
The hunt for the extraordinary
Then the conversation was over: Bezos immediately gave her the job and the “desk closest to him in the whole company,” says Hiatt. From today’s perspective, it is clear to her why the Amazon boss only asked her these two questions: He wanted to test whether she had the courage and the motivation to “be on the move at his pace”. Energy and ambition are more important than the skills learned at university, which is why Bezos always surrounded himself with employees whom he had to hold back rather than drive. “The key to the early success of Bezos and Amazon was this relentless pursuit of the extraordinary,” says Hiatt.
For Ann Hiatt, the job at Amazon was the start of a steep career. From 2002 to 2005 she worked as an assistant to Jeff Bezos, who has since given up his position as CEO of Amazon. She then worked for the Google CEO Eric Schmidt, among others. She now runs her own consulting company, with which she advises top-class company bosses and startups from Silicon Valley.
Sources: “CNBC “
This article originally appeared on stern.de.