How the Amazon Bar Raiser Process Works — Raising the Bar

Improving the imperfect system of choosing your next co-worker. The Bar Raiser process at Amazon scales one of the worlds most prolific hiring pipelines.

We are terrible at picking which people will become great co-workers in the long run. We review resumes and look for relevant experience, while combing through overstated or poorly explained projects. We attempt to test technical competence which took years to build through a few hours of observation. We ask for references, and pretend that feedback from specific named sources is remotely unbiased.

Beyond attempting to see if a candidate can accomplish tasks, we also need to make certain they have the right leadership qualities for our position.

Me — So what’s the main reason you’d like to transfer teams?

Employee — I can’t work with co-worker anymore. They’re constantly screwing up. They never admit that it’s their fault when their code breaks, then they fingers at their co-workers who missed their bugs. In general it’s making life on the team miserable.

Employees need to be able to get along with co-workers, graciously admit mistakes, give credit when it’s due, and at the very least, not make the work environment worse through their presence.

Finally, we need to accomplish the above without mistakenly bringing personal bias into the process. Beyond illegal bias (e.g. gender, or race), we need to be careful about our biases regarding education, grammar, the types of companies someone has worked at, and someone’s choice to spend the previous year surfing instead of working. We are all biased in a thousand ways, and we need to be cautious about which evaluations are valuable, and which are not.

Interviewing is hard. It takes dozens of interviews to feel remotely competent. It takes hundreds of interviews to begin to feel some aspects of mastery. Amazon invented a bar raiser position to bring mastery and experience into every interview loop.

What is a Bar Raiser?

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