A Three Topic Article — Interviewing, Multiple Choice Management, and My Holiday Gift Guide
Sometimes you have a single topic, sometimes you have three. Today is a 3-fer.
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 specific leadership advice.
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Hey there! When I sit down to write my articles each week, it can go various ways.
Sometimes I get an idea in my head that I can’t stop thinking about. Paragraphs pop into my head while I’m out raking the leaves. I think of sentences I want to write while I’m driving, and I repeat them to myself until I hit the next stoplight.
When I’m writing those, I tend to write thousands of words, and then start deleting paragraphs to make sure it’s not too long. Or, as happened the last two weeks, I have to split them in half because they’re far too long.
Other times, I come up with an idea of something to write, but I sense that it’d be a stretch to make it a whole article. I pile those up in my drafts folder, and occasionally I’ll sweep through, grab 2 or 3 of them, and combine them to make one article on multiple topics.
And that’s what I’m doing today. What topics am I covering, you ask? Well, let me tell you.
One — Using specifics while interviewing. Regardless of how many times I tell people they need to be specific, they continue to miss the point.
Two — Avoiding what I like to call multiple choice management.
Three — Dave’s Holiday gift guide (with zero affiliate links). Why would I write a gift guide? Because this is my newsletter so I can do what I want. And I really wanted to share something absolutely off-topic and fun.
Interviewing — Using Specifics
I’ve written many articles about interviewing. I spent many years as an Amazon bar raiser, hired dozens of people for my teams, and participated in well over a thousand interviews. I know what works, and what doesn’t.
There are a few patterns you see all the time, and one of those is the lack of specifics.
We all know that people want to see specific numbers in resumes. Not “I improved conversion rates in our registration pipeline”, but “I improved conversion rates in our registration pipeline by 13%.”
There’s a collective understanding that you’re probably just making that number up. Yet in your interview, if you have a reasonable explanation for how you calculated it, we’ll believe you. So make sure you’re ready for that question.
However, what people miss more often is that specifics are not just numbers. And that’s where you can shine, or you can miss the mark.
During debriefs, I can’t remember someone ever saying, “This candidate used too many examples.” or “This candidate was too specific about what they did.”
Yet, I can think of dozens and dozens of times we said that a candidate was too hand wavy, or wasn’t specific enough.
What do I mean by specifics? I mean that almost every time you answer a question, you should be following it up with specific examples or situations which back up your answer.
Q: “Tell me about your registration pipeline work?”
A: “I improved conversion rates in our registration pipeline by 13%. For example, we changed the pipeline from 4 pages to 3 pages, which reduced the number of customers falling out at earlier stages.”
Specifics are not just about numbers. They can be used to explain how you accomplished something.
Q: “Tell me about your philosophy around managing underperformers?”
A: “I believe in giving crisp and clear feedback as quickly as possible. For example, I had an engineer who repeatedly had to be told the same things in their code reviews. Specifically, their team members had to ask them to add unit tests repeatedly. I brought them into a one-on-one, and I said that they may personally disagree with their team’s unit test policy, but teams have collective rules everyone needs to follow. If they want to influence their team members to change their team’s policies, that’s fine. But they need to follow those policies.”
You can dive deeply into specific situations, without being long-winded. I just timed myself reading that, and it took less than 30 seconds. In 30 seconds, I was able to give a brief answer to the question, give an example, and then be very specific about that example.
For that specific question, I could give another answer or two, still keeping my overall answer within literally one minute. Perhaps I could say that I also give clear statements of potential consequences, and then give an example of a time that I had to warn someone about the seriousness of their poor performance.
Q: “Why do you want to work at Amazon?”
A: “I believe that Amazon is a place where I can make a serious impact. What I mean is that this organization runs the communication tools for Sellers on Amazon’s platform. As I read online, Sellers account for 61% of Amazon’s sales. If I make a small change in how Sellers can message buyers, I can literally impact 61% of Amazon’s retail sales. Or almost as crazy, if I understand the numbers right, around 20% of ecommerce sales in the United States. Even our smallest projects will have huge impact.”
Specifics convince me that you’ve really thought this through.
A critical part of the interview process is getting the interviewer to believe you.
The more specific you are, the more believable you are. Let’s try answers in the opposite direction, to see how this works.
Q: “Why do you want to work at Amazon?”
A: “Amazon is a place where I can make a serious impact.”
Ok? I guess. But is that really even an answer?
Q: “What did you do with the registration pipelines?”
A: “I improved conversion rates.”
This is the equivalent of saying, “I worked hard, and did good things.” Without specifics, I simply don’t believe you. You’ve provided zero evidence that you know what improves conversion rates, that you influenced conversion rates, that you understand how they’re measured, or any other piece of vital specifics which would let me believe that you did good things.
Absolutely useless. Yet in interviews, people do this every day.
So here’s my takeaway. In almost all situations, for almost all questions, your answers should be crisp, clear, efficient, and specific.
“Blah blah, for example.”
“Blah blah, and here’s why I believe that.”
“Blah blah, specifically more specific answer.”
And I’ll repeat for those in the audience who might get carried away. This doesn’t need to take a long time. You can be specific in tens of seconds. You shouldn’t feel that the pressure to be concise makes your answers generic.
“What did you do with the registration pipelines?”
“I improved conversion rates in our registration pipeline by 13%. The major change I made was changing the pipeline from 4 pages to 3 pages, which reduced the number of customers falling out at earlier stages. In particular, page 3 of the registration process had customers setting a password for their new account, and multiple customers dropped out, I assume because they didn’t want to make an account. So I changed the process to create a link in their email which they could use at any time to create a new account, with all their information filled in. This ensured that they could complete a purchase, but also registart if that’s what they wanted.”
That wouldn’t take more than an additional 15 seconds, and the answer is super believable.