Jeff Bezos warned Amazon.com's early managers in 1998 that the company would live or die by the caliber of its hires and reduced the company’s hiring philosophy to three deceptively simple questions that tied down to a common goal.
What Happened: In a shareholder letter that spring, Bezos instructed interviewers to ponder three queries before extending an offer: "Will you admire this person? … Will this person raise the average level of effectiveness of the group they're entering? … Along what dimension might this person be a superstar?"
The questions, he wrote, ensured "the bar has to continuously go up" and kept Amazon "fighting entropy" as it raced across the nascent internet retail landscape.
Bezos illustrated the point with whimsy. “One person here is a National Spelling Bee champion (1978, I believe). I suspect it doesn't help her in everyday work, but it does make working here more fun if you can occasionally snag her in the hall with a quick challenge: "onomatopoeia!",” he wrote. Unique talents, even unrelated to a job, he argued, "enrich the work environment for all of us."
That early doctrine was later formalized into Amazon's "bar-raiser" program, a cadre of trained interviewers who veto any candidate that fails to improve the talent pool, a system Chief Executive Andy Jassy still hails as "one of Amazon's crown jewels."
Why It Matters: Bezos kept evangelizing high standards long after Amazon scaled beyond books. His 2017 letter declared that "high standards are teachable" and fundamental to meeting ever-rising customer expectations. "Once you've tasted high standards, there's no going back," he summarized to shareholders.
Inside the company, those ideals shape everything from six-page narrative memos that replace PowerPoints to rigorous interview loops codified this year into a public six-step guide for applicants.
Even Amazon's 2020 shareholder letter repeated the 1998 refrain, where it said setting the hiring bar high "will continue to be the single most important element of Amazon.com's success."
Critics say the relentless pace breeds a cut-throat culture, yet Amazon's leaders counter that the same toughness powered the company's expansion from online bookstore to global logistics and cloud titan.
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