My Experience at an Amazon Recruiting Trip

Welcome to the Scarlet Ink newsletter. I'm Dave Anderson, an ex-Amazon Tech Director and GM. Each week I write a newsletter article on tech industry careers and tactical leadership advice.

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AI has made a real mess out of recruiting. It's an arms race between people trying to cheat recruiting systems and companies trying to figure out how to keep their interview process as cheap as possible.

The years during and since COVID-19 have seen continual upheaval. We've seen the use of online tests grow, while various companies and AI tools are built to cheat those tests. And of course, companies are building tools to try to prevent cheating. Video calls are one tool to help add a little humanity to the process, but AI video filters make it challenging to know if you're talking to the human you intended to interview or if it's a real human at all.

I'm still convinced that there's no good replacement for in-person interviews. Yes, it's expensive for candidates to take a day or two off work for travel, the cost of hotels, flights, etc. But heck, hiring the wrong candidate is expensive as well.

The standard way companies interview a person in person is to screen the candidate, and then fly them out to the interview location (usually the headquarters).

However, when there is a location filled with potential candidates, you can sometimes improve the process by reversing the travel requirements. You can send 5 or 6 employees to a location and interview many dozens of candidates in a single week. These recruiting trips, when done right, can lead to quite a few hires in a short period of time.

In this article, I share what it was like to do an Amazon recruiting trip as the bar raiser. For completeness, I walk through every moment of the trip, from invitation through candidate offers. This isn't about a specific recruiting trip (since they all blend in my head), but the events are all experiences I encountered over the years.

Dave being friendly and sneaky.

I stopped by my recruiter's office on a Friday morning with the pretense of just being a friendly guy. I mean, I am a friendly guy. But I had ulterior motives. Before I continue, what does ulterior mean? I'm not looking it up. But I've never used that word, apart from in the phrase I just used.

Anyway, it's always a good idea to build personal relationships with your recruiting team when you manage a team. Your employees are your biggest lever in being successful, so clearly the recruiting team is critically important to your success.

But I had two specific purposes in mind.

First, this recruiter frequently had donuts at their desk on Friday mornings. I don't need donuts, and I shouldn't eat donuts. But I love them. If I was lucky, I'd have a donut and coffee morning. That was a great way to start a day.

Second, I had heard through the grapevine that a different engineering team had recently participated in a recruiting event but had run out of open positions. As Amazon at this time always had open roles, the candidates would certainly get an offer, just for a different team. The early bird gets the worm, and the early manager gets the candidates. I knew there was a chance that my friendly desk visit could lead to a free hire or two for my teams.

I peeked my head into Katrina's office and gave a cheerful wave.

"Hey Katrina! Happy Friday! Going fishing again this weekend?"

She smiled and shook her head. Then she motioned towards the large donut box on the end of her desk. I'd seen it immediately with my trained donut senses. I didn't hesitate, moving forward to grab a tasty treat.

"No, it's going to be raining this weekend. I'll take the weekend off.

By the way, did you hear about our Costa Rica trip earlier in the week? It went amazing! Very successful. Ivan was able to fill his headcount completely, and we have two extra SDE-2's. Are you interested?"

SDE-2's are mid-level engineers, a perfect level for my open headcount. I smiled, patting myself mentally on the back. I was known for filling my open positions quickly, and I was winning yet again.

"Oh wow, great job! Your team rocks. I'd certainly love a couple more engineers. My managers would love to fill a couple of their open positions. This'll help a lot. Thanks Katrina!

Fingers crossed I could get this locked in before another manager came by. I was thinking of ways I could get her to assign these candidates to my positions as quickly as possible. I didn't want to share. I'm greedy like that.

"Well, I'm glad to help our favorite engineering leader!" Katrina replied, "Perhaps you can help me out too. We're in desperate need of a bar raiser to go to Atlanta for a recruiting trip next week. We have all the interviewers ready and booked, but we haven't been able to find any available bar raisers. You'd have to fly out Sunday.

Can you help us out? It would be a lifesaver. I'm sure we can get you those extra engineers from Costa Rica. Maybe if Atlanta is very successful, we could find you another hire or two?"

Oh snap. She got me. I'm not the only one who plays work games. This wasn't the first time I'd been trapped by the recruiting team. They often had problems finding bar raisers to go on these flyover state trips. Bar raisers were (by far) the most difficult people to schedule, and they were a required component of any interview loop. At least I was now guaranteed those two hires from the Costa Rica trip as part of the "trade".

Being a friendly bar raiser was great fun when I got sent on exciting trips to foreign locations like Brazil, and sometimes if the event was successful, I'd nab a hire or two for my group. But it also meant that I couldn't leave my recruiting team in the lurch unless I had a serious reason I couldn't go. With my sneaky stop for donuts and hires, I'd ambushed myself into flying out to Atlanta in 48 hours.

"Absolutely Katrina, I'm available. Happy to help out! Send me the details?"

She was thrilled. I pretended to be happy. Atlanta? Bah. I took an extra donut. Comfort food.

Clearing my schedule.

I received the details from Katrina by the time I reached my desk. She was suspiciously ready to send me everything. Bah. I bet she would have stopped by my office if I hadn't done it first.

Oh, surprise. She really got me. My last few domestic trips had been two-day or three-day affairs. This trip was a full Monday through Friday trip. Holy cow, my mistake agreeing to something without details. Sigh. I don't know if it would have changed my answer, but I make a mental note to ask for details in the future before agreeing to things.

Considering I had just lost an entire week of work, I immediately cancelled a couple of meetings and spent the next two hours doing emergency schedule work. I informed my wife, my manager, rescheduled a dozen meetings, cancelled a couple of dozen others, and messaged some of my team members to take over critical tasks.

I usually had around 40-hours of meetings per week (probably around 55-60 meetings per week on average), so clearing a week was a serious effort.