Amazon. Well, Amazon has recently been in the news for some of its antitrust hearings and
the challenges that the business faces from a regulatory perspective. Amazon has also been in
the news for the massive value that it’s created, especially in light of COVID 19. When people
couldn’t go into or didn’t choose to go into hard retail stores, Amazon delivered more product than
ever to especially the U.S. consumers. And what we’re looking at today is how Amazon is
transforming its hiring policies. First of all, Amazon is one of the first big tech companies to
throw out the old 2019 playbook when it comes to hiring in 2020. Some of their initial adjustment
early in 2019 involved making changes to who they were hiring from and how many people they were
hiring. For many organizations, many MBA programs in particular, Amazon became one of their top
hiring candidates. And so if you were interested in going into the tech field, Amazon all of
the sudden was your number one choice for many organizations. However, in this last year in 2020,
Amazon has reversed some of their initial policies of building strong relationships with core target
schools, tossed out the playbook, shredded it entirely and said hey, we want to reinvent the
wheel. And so Amazon, with a slow start in the spring with questionability about its online
programs and its summer internships has gone full steam ahead into hiring aggressively at
the MBA level, but doing it in a very different way. What are the two changes? Amazon and many
other companies, such as Facebook and Google, have followed suit, have changed their plans
for who they will hire, where they will hire from, and when they will hire. Let me walk through each
one of those. First of all, who will they hire. Amazon is now more broad than ever about who would
be a great candidate for the role at Amazon. One of the core things that is incredibly consistent
is they are looking for strong analytical abilities. But this opens the door to different
masters programs, not just MBA programs, but masters programs including Masters in engineering,
Masters in business analytics, Masters in finance. So Amazon has thrown open the door for who they’re
hiring. They’ve said that they’re open to people with degrees and advanced degrees of all different
sorts, provided you have one common theme, and that’s analytics. The second thing is where they
are hiring. Amazon, for the last number of years, has built legacy relationships with a couple of
core target schools, namely tier 1 target schools where they’ve gotten most of their hiring done.
But with a combination of a much larger need for talent because of the growth of Amazon,
as well as its focus on the virtual hiring, Amazon has done a complete playbook change by focusing
rather than on a couple of core target schools, throwing out the list of target schools and saying
all are welcome, all should please apply. Amazon’s using the systems that it’s built up internally
to manage a major influx of candidates from other schools. So if you’re at a tier 1 school, it just
got a little bit more competitive for you. You’re not any longer given a front row seat into the
Amazon hiring line. If instead you’re at a level 2 or a level 3 school, and you haven’t had Amazon
on campus before, congratulations. Now Amazon is absolutely a target firm for you. Third. When are
they hiring? Amazon said hey, why do we even need to wait for students to be back in the classroom
and back on campus. We can find them now. So they throw open their doors to hiring on August 15,
earlier than many organizations had before. And because of those early start dates and the early
interview dates, people are scrambling this year. Organizations such as career services offices
have to get their students ready faster and make sure that they know about Amazon opportunities.
Amazon isn’t necessarily streamlining on campus. There’s a different process in addition that
students need to be informed about. And students need to be ready to get into the
mix earlier because when the spots are full, the spots are full. Now one good thing about Amazon
is that historically they have done a second round of hiring in the spring of every year,
and we expect next year to be no different. In fact, if Amazon’s demand continues to increase,
their demand for talent will increase accordingly and so they will still need to hire people
even if they fill all the anticipated slots this year should their growth continue. If you
are interested in applying to Amazon, Facebook, Google or any of the other tech usual suspects,
we would love to help. At Management Consulted we offer world-class edits as well as great
interview preparation. You can get one or both in a package and we’d love to work with you.