What is the Bar Raiser concept at Amazon ?

https://www.aboutamazon.eu/news/working-at-amazon/what-is-a-bar-raiser-at-amazon aligns with what I know from my time there, but there actually maybe some folks in Taro who are / were bar raisers at some point in their career who can talk about it some more.

Interview bar raisers are basically experienced interviewers from outside the hiring manager's organization that help calibrate interview standards across the company. It's a high-demand, voluntary role on top of one's day job with a lot of potential impact.

Are you asking this question because you would like to be a bar raiser?

I spent four years as a Bar Raiser. The basic idea is that Amazon is a huge company with many teams and interviewers with varying experience. But, the company has a goal of constantly raising the bar on the quality of its employees. So, in principle, if you look at the employee pool for each job family 10 years apart you should see a significant increase in the quality.

Interviews are the gate-keeping process that lets new engineers into this pool. So it's important that someone is enforcing the quality of hiring decisions. That's where the Bar Raisers come in.

Mindset

We undergo six months of training that helps us get really calibrated on what a bar-raising candidate looks like. This means not only interviewing engineers but also across other job families. A big part is understanding the Amazon Leadership Principles and how they're applied across the different levels at the company. For example, an L6 engineer and an L6 PM should exhibit similar leadership skills. Bar Raisers can spot these even in different contexts.

Responsibilities

In practice, Bar Raisers run the loops at Amazon in partnership with HR and the Hiring Manager. They help make sure the right competencies are being covered by the interviewers, that there's no overlap across interviews and the right data is being collected to make a good hiring decision.

They also lead the debrief process where all the interview notes are reviewed and a hiring decision is made. They don't make the hiring decision but instead, make sure that data is interpreted correctly and everyone else arrives at the right hiring decision. In rare cases, they can exercise a special veto power to make sure that a bad candidate isn't hired.

Candidate perspective

From your perspective as a candidate, it actually doesn't matter if your interviewer is a Bar Raiser. Bar Raisers are just really good interviewers. They know how to ask better questions and create a better candidate experience. If you want to learn about my experience as a candidate you can read this LinkedIn post I wrote.

Contrary to popular belief, Bar Raise interviews aren't harder. If anything, you should have a better interview experience and have a smoother process.