Is Amazon hard to get hired?

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Background

Amazon is one of the largest corporations in the world today. Amazon employs nearly 1 million people all over the world. It is a mixture of part time and full time employees and Amazon has been hiring continuously hundreds of employees every month. Amazon has their headquarters in Seattle and various other cities across the globe. It is one of the largest employers among the technology corporations in the world. Amazon is one of the most attractive employers as well for students and graduates who are looking to build a career in the computer science and technology industry. However, getting hired by Amazon for some of these much coveted roles require a lot of effort. Only about 2% of the candidates who apply for a job actually get hired at Amazon. Preparation is key of getting a job at Amazon. You should know what you actually want to do and which program you want to be a part of in Amazon. Amazon has a comprehensive list of about 14 leadership principles. Amazon also is fully aware of what it is looking for in a candidate early on in the interview process. The hiring process of Amazon actually starts about an year before the start date of hiring an employee. Usually most of the new hires at Amazon start between April and September.

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Amazon Hiring Timelines

In the Amazon jobs portal, you can explore the various different Amazon jobs. You can also explore the various campus and Twitch portals besides applying on the Amazon job portal. About five to eight months ahead of the actual recruitment, you will be engaged in the assessment and interview activities with Amazon. About two months ahead of the onboarding process, you will be engaged in various team assignments with Amazon. The onboarding process begins usually one to two months ahead of your first day of working at Amazon. Let's learn about this in some more details. To get hired at Amazon, it is recommended by the senior management at Amazon that candidates should start exploring their positions almost an year ahead at the Amazon jobs portal. This will allow you as the candidate to get a complete understanding of what actually you want to do at Amazon and what roles and responsibilities are aligned with your skill sets. You also get time to build up your skills so that you can present yourself as a competitive candidate.

Is Amazon hard to get hired
Is Amazon hard to get hired?

Amazon Hiring Steps Durations

With better preparation, exposure, and the knowledge about all the different roles in Amazon, you also get more insight on what kind of employee Amazon is actually looking for. After a candidate has explored the available positions at Amazon, the candidate needs to work hard on making themselves a better candidate by learning new skills, and brushing up their existing skills. It is now the time to apply. Candidates can look at Amazon on campus career fairs, or online in other different portals for Amazon jobs. By keeping a close watch in these different portals, candidates will be able to keep track of the available positions as soon as they open at Amazon. This process will take three to four months. Then after you send in your application, you will need to wait because this is the time that Amazon will pick candidates to proceed to the next phase of their assessment and interview processes. This interview process can take a few weeks to few months time and you will be notified about the different stages, and ultimately whether you have been selected for the job. If you are selected for the job offer at Amazon, you will be notified by the offer letter from Amazon. This process can take five to six months. If you have been selected for the job offer at Amazon, you will be receiving the offer letter around this time. Time to cherish. It has been a long interview and assessment process and ultimately your wait will be over.

Amazon New Hires and Internships

The exact timing of the offer letter from Amazon can vary by a few weeks. However, this is a tentative time that you can expect to receive your offer letter. Once you received the offer letter from Amazon, you will have to accept it. And finally you get your team assignment one to two months ahead. Most of the new hires at Amazon start between the months of April and September. However, the timing is not fixed or static and varies. The start date varies throughout the year at different times when the job offers are given to the candidates. During this period, you will be engaged in the onboarding process at Amazon to begin your first day of work. Let's learn about the different ways how you can get a job at Amazon and get hired at Amazon for different positions, like as an intern or an entry level position. Student internships are an attractive job opportunity at Amazon. Amazon offers various types of student internships all over the world and has various types of technical, engineering, research, and business internships. The internships at Amazon are built for those who are graduating with a Master's degree, MBA, PhD, or an undergraduate degree as well.

Amazon Internship Experiences

The Amazon internships are offered to candidates throughout the entire year. The majority of the internships take place in Amazon during the summer and continue for about three to four months. The Amazon interns get to work on a variety of different projects. This provides a great platform of learning various tools and technologies that vastly accelerates the career growth of the intern candidates. Amazon interns are often involved in projects like writing customer facing contents for various Amazon devices like the Amazon Echo. Amazon interns have also been engaged in launching Amazon Prime pricing tools and features. One of the many interesting projects that Amazon interns also get to work on is creating real time feedback systems for different hourly employees. One of the key systems in Amazon is their Amazon fulfillment process. The interns who joined Amazon also get to work on identifying the challenges and implementing various ways that would help improve the fulfillment process of Amazon. Interns at Amazon also play a key role in suggesting and building various new features for the main website of Amazon at amazon.com.

Amazon Interns Projects

The projects for the Amazon interns can range from different products for customers to creating various different features that might be released in the future. Interns at Amazon get to participate in various roles in the different phases of software development, product management, and finance and retail operations. The internship program at Amazon is a great opportunity for candidates to get high quality experience and facilitates considerable growth in your career. During the entire duration of an internship, Amazon interns will own their tasks from start to the finish at various times during the different stages of a project. Other Amazon teams provide feedback to the intern on their overall performance. That feedback is also provided on the deliverables and the different skills of the intern as they relate to the role. The other Amazon teams also provide feedback on the project expectations and more insights into Amazon's leadership principles. Thus when the internship ends, an intern will know how they are as an employee and what they need to work on to make themselves better professionals in their field.

Importance of Amazon Interns

The interns who get to work at Amazon are also provided with a mentor who guides them and a manager who oversees all the activity they are doing. The mentor and the manager will also help the intern succeed and help facilitate the learning and career growth of the intern. They will also provide guidance on various aspects to the intern during their project activities. The intern will also be receiving feedback on key deliverables from the their assigned mentor and the manager. The Amazon mentor and manager will also help the intern to remove different barriers and challenges that they face during their internship program. It is important to note that various senior leaders of Amazon started their career as interns. Hence, it is an extremely important program and a source for discovering talent. It is important to also know that training is a very important and significant aspect of Amazon. Amazon is focused on empowering their employees and interns to take complete ownership of the work that they're doing. There are various self service resources that are provided by Amazon to help individuals meet their team goals and targets.

Amazon Employees Perks

Amazon also encourages their employees and interns to learn from each other. During the entire Internship Program, Amazon also provides formal classroom trainings and self service learning offerings. These Amazon services are focused on topics like managing experiences, analyzing the data to get more insights, solving problems that can help improve different products, writing narrative documents that can help users understand how to navigate and use different products and features, and also working backwards from the end user and customer experience to the end goal. Along with the different projects at Amazon, interns are also provided with different opportunities to develop their individual skills both at a personal and professional level. Interns get the opportunity to expand their personal and professional network by participating in various social events and workshops. Amazon interns can also join different Amazon affinity groups to explore all the resources that Amazon has to offer. To get to be a part of the Amazon internship programs, candidates can visit various campuses for career fairs, or check for available roles in Twitch or the Amazon jobs career portal.

Amazon Jobs Eligibility

Amazon hires and recruits different students for internships at different times of the year. The hiring timelines can vary considerably every year. And it is also influenced by the urgency with which Amazon needs to fill out that role, the location, and the particular department and Amazon team that is hiring. Amazon also hires a lot of graduates. So if you are about to graduate and want to work at Amazon, you should look out for the variety of entry level positions that Amazon hires for. These entry level positions require a variety of different types of skills that Amazon is constantly trying to fill. The different jobs of recent graduates for Amazon are in the areas of technical research, business, and engineering. Amazon offers jobs for undergraduate degrees, Master's degree, MBA or PhD as Amazon offers jobs in all countries all over the world. For technical and engineering roles, Amazon has a variety of opportunities and vacancies.

Amazon Job Opportunities

The type of responsibilities expected for a candidate in technical and engineering role ranges from designing and building innovative technologies in some of the latest environments with distributed computing framework, to designing various consumer products and improving their designs for Amazon customers. Amazon also has a lot of jobs and opportunities in the research field where PhD and Master's students can contribute in building a diverse, large scale platform. Amazon also hires research candidates for solving various technical problems and build highly scalable applications using some of the latest cutting edge techniques and capabilities in the field of machine learning, operations research, and computer vision. Amazon is also hiring for jobs that need superior business management skills. Candidates can apply if they have Master's degree, and MBA students also can apply to contribute to the company's overall growth and help manage critical projects and execution plans. Business Management candidates work in Amazon with various different key groups and stakeholders. They utilize data and analytics in Amazon to take different complex decisions, and simultaneously try to enhance the overall business experience.

Author: Rahul Bhattacharya

Rahul is a journalist with expertise in researching a variety of topics and writing engaging contents. He is also a data analyst and an expert in visualizing business scenarios using data science. Rahul is skilled in a number of programming languages and data analysis tools. When he is not busy writing, Rahul can be found somewhere in the Appalachian trails or in an ethnic restaurant in Chicago.

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