This article is published via a special e27 partnership with StackTrek– a company specialising in using algorithms and data to build and scale programming teams for tech companies. Each week, StackTrek Founder & CEO Billy Yuen talks with top executives about startups, culture, and tech hiring.
Amazon Web Services is the most comprehensive cloud platform that offers a plethora of data tools for its customers with over 165 services catering to literally millions of customers. I chatted with AWS technical evangelist Ian Massingham about data-driven hiring practices, bar-raising, and ultimately, the culture of customer obsession.
How does AWS hire developers?
So Amazon and AWS use the same kind of hiring practices. There’s a couple of different characteristics that I personally feel are unique. The first is, we hire on the basis of something that we call Amazon Leadership Principles and you can find these listed on the Amazon website actually.
There are 14 of them and they describe different behaviours that we think are important for success at Amazon. The most important and the first one of those things is customer obsession. So we’re always looking for team members that obsess every customer needs and have a desire to solve problems for customers and help customers seize opportunities.
And that’s customers of all types, whether it’s an Amazon retail customer or an AWS customer, of course. And then we’ve got 14 of those things like hiring and developing the best itself is a leadership principle, insist on the highest standards, bias for action, deliver results, dive deep. So we have 14 of these different leadership principles that we look for in every candidate that we’re looking to hire.
And then the second of the unique characteristics that we look for is something that we call bar-raising. And the idea here is, when we hire new talent in the organisation, we’re constantly looking to improve the average of the capability level that we have in the teams.
So we’re always looking to hire above the midpoint for that particular pool of expertise in that particular role It’s this idea of constantly ratcheting up the midpoint by hiring more and more capable people.
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Are there any characteristics in candidates that you consider red flags?
We’re looking for people that are bar-raising against these leadership principles that we define. So any candidate that we would evaluate which didn’t demonstrate that they were exceeding that type of capability for that particular role, for that particular seniority level would be a candidate that we wouldn’t necessarily take forward.
But of course, we have opportunities to put candidates into different pools and maybe take a second look at a candidate, if they don’t match for the initial role we’ve looked into. So I wouldn’t describe it so much as red flags, but we do use a very data-driven approach to our hiring practices to try to ensure that we are always hiring and developing the best people that we can.
Are there any specific challenges in terms of hiring tech developers?
In my team, which is the developer of Evangelism, which is the developer relations type of role you might be familiar with, we’re looking for a particular combination of skills.
So those skills are pretty common in isolation, but when you think about combining really strong technical skills, the ability to build with software developers and convey knowledge and transfer value to software developers through the creation of content, through a presentation, maybe demo building which helps developers move forward with their objectives with the cloud, gaining the combination of skills, in the right individuals, in the right locations with the right language skills … you’re looking at a pretty small overlap amongst the few different sites on the Venn diagram.
That can be quite a challenging thing to do.
So, Amazon and AWS have many different teams all over the world. How do you make sure everyone is on the same page?
Yeah, so we use a lot of collaboration tools, as you might guess, inside AWS and Amazon to help our teams collaborate. Using two things like arrow messaging and video conferencing service which we call Amazon Chime, and we have a lot of other tools and systems internally that teams can choose to adopt in order to help them collaborate across different geographic regions.
There really are all ranges of tools available. And in fact, one of the things that we always love to do within Amazon and AWS is taking the good tools that we build internally and make them available for customers to use externally within tools like Amazon Web Services.
So good examples there would be things like Amazon WorkDocs. This is our document sharing collaboration platform that we use internally and we also make available for customers to use so they can collaborate around document work files. There are all kinds of different stuff that we have for them.
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Although the thing that I would say about AWS is with our customer-obsessed mindset, we’re always looking to put our teams in the places where our customers need them. So we’re very often, for example in opening new offices or opening new AWS data centre clusters which we call regions, we got one of them opening in Jakarta in 2020, so there’s also a constant cycle of geographic expansion for our teams as well and that’s something that we have a lot of support for in the organisation as well.
Seeing as you have teams in several different geographies, diversity is certainly a topic. Talk about the diversity in your team and in your company.
So the most obvious example of diversity is gender diversity. So trying to make sure that you’ve got an appropriate balance of different genders within the organisation. And that’s something that can be relatively challenging to do with software engineering, where the candidate pool is quite heavily skewed towards people who identify as male.
So you have a hiring challenge, but we do take proactive steps to try to ensure that we’re considering diversity in candidates at every stage of the process.
Working on things like sourcing, trying to make sure that we’ve got the right gender mix at the beginning of the pipeline, as well as making sure that we don’t favour one gender over another, so we’re doing things like candidate assessments. So that’s something that we actively work on. Then the second area, of course, is the diversity of thought.
So it’s about finding people from backgrounds, coming from different ethnic or racial groups, or people who have different educational backgrounds.
Counterintuitively, it might not actually be the best idea to staff your team with a set of carbon copy computer science grads, it’s helpful to have people who’ve entered software development, and a variety of different backgrounds. This is actually really important in the development relations role where we are working with software developers that themselves have really strong diversity characteristics.
And some developers want to engage with developer evangelists, relation professionals that are similar to them, that have similar characteristics. So it’s something that I and my team really spend a lot of time focusing on.
Is there a tip you’d like to share with people who are looking to build a successful team?
Yeah, I would say don’t compromise on hiring. So insist on the highest standards as one of our leadership principles. It’s better to wait to get the right candidate than it is to hire quickly and make a mistake hiring somebody that you either have to reverse a hiring decision –which is time-consuming and costly – and that obviously can be detrimental –not only to the organisation, but also to the individual that you’ve hired.
And that can also consume a lot of cycles for a management and team perspective as well. So my number one tip for hiring is to maintain high standards and don’t rush the hiring process. It’s better to wait and get the right people than just seize an early candidate because it’s easy to do so.
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