They are the best online retailer--love 'em!
SELECTION: Amazon has everything.
PRICE: Amazon is reasonably priced.
SPEED: Amazon Prime gets you your goodies delivered in under 48 hours.
RETURNS: Amazon takes returns easily; virtually no questions asked.
Amazon is so customer focused that you can even email Jeff Bezos, the founder and CEO himself, at Jeff@Amazon.com.
Aside from their highly successful retail operation, they have the Kindle tablets, Amazon Web Services (AWS) for cloud computing, Kiva Robots for warehouse operations, and more.
So what's the secret of their success?
One thing, according to the Wall Street Journal, is their tough hiring practices.
Amazon has "several hundred" interviewers called "Bar Raisers" that give candidates extremely thorough interviews.
Bar Raisers typically have conducted "dozens or hundreds of interviews and gained a reputation for asking tough questions and identifying candidates who go on to become stars."
Typically, it "takes five or six employees at least two hours each" to evaluate and vet an applicant.
Amazon makes all this effort in recruiting to weed out people who are the wrong fit for the company.
They believe that it's better to invest in a sophisticated recruiting process than to make costly hiring mistakes.
While this certainly sounds like a well thought out and vigorous hiring process, the article makes little to no mention of performance measures showing that their hires really are better matches, have superior performance, or stay with the company longer.
The one anecdote given was of a Bar Raiser who found a candidate for a programming job that "didn't know much about the specific programming language."
Barring some real statistics though, either you could conclude that Amazon's hiring process is truly superior or perhaps question why it takes them 5 to 6 interviews to do what other successful companies do in 1 or 2.
Either way though, Amazon is a amazingly great company. ;-)
(Source Photo: Andy Blumenthal)