Started with a referral from a current Amazon employee (past colleague) for a marketing manager role . I completed an online assessment as a first step and a recruiter reached out a few days later via email to setup a 30 minute phone call to discuss the application. She was extremely nice and very helpful, letting me know that I was being moved for consideration from a marketing manager role to a vendor manager role due to my experience working in CPG brand & trade marketing. She also noted that she was working to find the appropriate "level" role for me given my fairly high level of experience.
The vendor manager roles at Amazon are similar to traditional retail buyers and my background was a good fit.
The next steps consisted of two phone interviews with current Amazon employees, both scheduled for 45 minutes. The interviewers were professional but robotic and seemed to read from the same script to start the phone call -- letting me know that we had 45 minutes and that we would be staying strict with the time, that they would spend 5-10 minutes reviewing the role and my background, followed by 30 minutes of STAR format interview questions, and wrapping up with 5 minutes for me to ask questions. It was very distracting to hear the interviewers type non-stop (and very loudly) during the phone interview -- both phone interviews -- and both interviewers were reading questions from an internal question bank. There was no opportunity or willingness to connect on a personal-level in either session. While preparing for the phone interviewers, I also took note of the in-person interview process described by others who had interviewed with Amazon -- which seemed to mirror the robotic and strictly scripted approach I experienced in my phone interviews.
Overall, it was a straightforward & fine interview process. After my final phone interview, I removed myself from consideration as I simply felt that the Amazon culture wouldn't be a good fit for me.
