The Bar Raiser Interview — Getting a job at Amazon

Dispelling the myths and misconceptions about Bar Raisers at Amazon and what it means for you as an interviewee.

So, you have an upcoming interview with Amazon. Since you’re a smart and resourceful person, you have already asked your recruiter what the interviews look like, and since they are a nice person, they already told you to prepare for a bunch of things, including specifically, Leadership principles. You google around a little bit and keep running across this thing called a “Bar Raiser”, and there are horror stories of how Bar Raiser rounds are “difficult”, “hard-to-clear”, “a big barrier”, and even borderline evil.

The internet doing its thing — exaggerating things as usual.

Just reading the feedback on the internet, you would think these rounds are purely designed to keep people out of Amazon. The truth, as usual, is a whole lot different from that.

The bar is an imaginary line that represents the 50th percentile of all Amazon employees currently working at that role. A Bar Raiser’s role is to make sure that every hiring committee focuses on maintaining and improving this bar.

The whole purpose of this article is to help you understand what Bar Baisers (BRs) do at Amazon, clear up some myths and misconceptions, and show you how to apply this new-found knowledge to better prepare for the Amazon interview. So here goes…

Myth #1: The Bar Raiser is a Gatekeeper

One of the biggest myths around is that the Bar Raiser acts as a gatekeeper and decides whether a hire decision goes through or not.

The goal of the Bar Raiser is to act as a “Risk Manager”. During the debrief, we typically summarize the risks we see with a Candidate and make an evaluation of whether that level of risk is acceptable or not. Once we evaluate this, we make a recommendation to the Hiring Manager, who then gets to decide whether or not the candidate gets hired.

The Bar Raiser typically evaluates your risk profile holistically, taking into account your performance on the Interview, the feedback from interviewers for both functional competencies and…