Amazon employee hired on the spot by Jeff Bezos after they answered his two most important questions perfectly
An Amazon employee was incredibly hired on the spot by Jeff Bezos after they answered his two most important questions perfectly.
The worker, named Ann Hiatt, recalled how she took the plunge to apply for the role of Bezos’ junior assistant despite having no previous experience as an assistant.
This was just after she had graduated from the University of Washington in 2002, and made the decision to try a field that she never expected - tech.
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Hiatt bagged an interview with Amazon before going through a 'dizzying' process involving 'back-to-back interviews with the senior assistants'.
However, she made it through the rounds to the final interview, which she didn’t know beforehand would be with the top boss himself.
There, Bezos asked two simple questions.
Speaking to CNBC, Hiatt said: “Bezos started the interview by promising that he was only going to ask two questions and that the first one would be a ‘fun brain teaser’.”
For the first question, Hiatt had to estimate the number of panes of glass in the city of Seattle.
She admitted she was “terrified” by the question at first, but quickly put her thinking cap on and did some calculations.
Explaining how she came to her answer, she wrote: “I outlined how I would start with the number of people in Seattle, which I thankfully correctly guessed as around one million, just to make the math easier.
“Then I said that they would each have a home, a mode of transportation, and an office or school - all of which would have windows. So I suggested that we base the estimate on averages of those.”
After 10 minutes of math, Hiatt presented her estimate to Bezos.
“That looks about right,” he told her at the time, evidently pleased with her answer.
Now, for the second question, the business mogul asked Hiatt about her career goals.
“I told him that Amazon had proven to be a company full of ambitious and passionate people,” Hiatt recalled.
“I wanted to be like them and learn what they knew. Their strengths were in the areas I personally wanted to develop, so the value of the experience was obvious, even though it felt like a diversion from my goal of being a professor.
“I explained that I had no idea how to be an assistant, but that I knew the importance of being consistently outside of my comfort zone. I wanted to jump into an astronomical learning and growth curve.”
Following her successful answers, Hiatt was hired “on the spot” and the rest was history.
Starting off as a junior assistant, she continued to work closely with Bezos during her time at Amazon and eventually became one of his Executive Business Partners.