Amazon engineer: Highlight your success in interviews, not your team’s

Don’t
do this in your next interview.

WOCinTech
Chat/Flickr

• Your interview is
  your opportunity to sway recruiters
  during the job search.
• Corey Salzer, who was hired at Amazon right
  out of college, said leaning too much on your team’s
  accomplishments can alienate recruiters during the interview
  process.
• Instead, make it clear that you were a key contributor
  to your company.

Recruiters everywhere seem to agree on one point.

They want to know
what you did in your previous roles — not what your job title
was, or how famous your company is, or a laundry list of your job
requirements.

“Titles are great, but we want to understand what was the project
you owned, what was the scope of a project, and what did you
accomplish,” Celeste Joy Diaz, the recruiting manager for
university programs at Amazon, previously told
Business Insider.

Corey Salzer, who graduated from the University of Washington in
St. Louis in 2017 and started working at Amazon right after,
agrees. When she gives advice to others about how to get a job at
Amazon, she said it’s important to emphasize what you did as part
of a team or company. 

“If it kind of comes out in part of your interview where
maybe you were part of a team and you’re really only
talking about the accomplishments of the team and not necessarily
your individual contributions and what they did, I think
that’s something that can hold people back,” Salzer, who is a
solutions architect at Amazon Web Services, told Business
Insider.

Instead, make it clear that you were a key contributor to your
company. Emphasizing your individual accomplishments in a
team is a key way to sway hiring managers. 

And it’s not just Amazon recruiters who want to hear about the
fact that you can take charge of a project and lead it. 

Tina Nicolai, executive career coach and founder of Résumé Writers’ Ink,
previously
told Business Insider that it’s important to define your
accomplishments with numbers.

When making your résumé, expand upon what you did in that job
that brought value — whether that’s an amount of revenue you
produced, projects you led, or how you excelled in your monthly
goals. Including the numbers that back up your success is key.

Be as specific as possible. Write, “Helped grow revenue by 500%
to $1 million in 12 month period by doing X” instead of “Helped
grow revenue,” Nicolai said.

In the interview, it can be more tempting to speak with less
specificity. You might end up discussing your company, general
job description, or what your team does. But it’s still crucial
to emphasize how you were a leader within the company — not just
another cog.

“People might not take the time to think about the impact
of the work they’ve done,” Diaz said. “I want to understand scope
of impact more than just job titles.”