Once you have your specification for employees clearly established, how do you apply it? Amazon selected people to serve as the Bar Raiser. Their function in interviews is to test candidates on their ability to understand Amazon’s leadership principles and fit into its culture. Crucially, the person who is the Bar Raiser is not on the hiring team a

I suggest a simple rule: no more than five interviews and two weeks once the candidate sets foot in the building.

Interviews and Hiring Hiring involves all the managerial body parts: heart, soul, nose and gut (but mostly gut). Don’t try to do it alone — two guts are more than twice as good as one. Ask new hires to undertake one project at exactly the level of competence they have already proved, to defer real stretch goals till the next time. Ask for pointers:

We borrowed our hiring process from Google. Every single person that comes through the door goes through a standardized interview with at least eight people who interview them, often in pairs. There are standardized scorecards, standardized questions, all managed by an applicant-tracking system. The hiring manager has to defend each candidate like