I was contacted by Amazon, who found my resume posting on Monster.com. After the initial communication from the HR recruiter, I was interviewed in a series of phone interviews. The first phone interview was by an HR person, that was pretty standard. Then I had a series of three more phone interviews by various employees of the company, two that worked at the present location of where the job would be at. Those, again, were fairly standard behavioral type phone interviews. Even so, they were very long, the longest clocking in at over 90 minutes. This was pretty grueling and longer than any phone interview I'd ever experienced in a long career.
Finally they made an offer to fly me to West Virginia where the actual job posting was. This was a long, long flighty from where I live literally across the country. After a long and grueling flight process (changed planes three times) and all day on a plane, I was happy to see when I checked into my room that it was a beautiful room in a nice, new hotel. I relaxed and prepared my notes for the following day's interviews.
Monday morning I arrived early at the Amazon location, one of two in that town. I was greeted cordially by the receptionist and got my first taste of Amazon - when they had told me dress was casual, they meant it. The receptionist was dressed in jeans and t-shirt. I saw various employees trickling in and it was more of the same. I felt pretty out of place in my slacks and button up shirt. I thought I was being fairly casual by not wearing a tie! I felt like the interviewers and HR person who "prepared" me for this interview process should have let me know that it was super casual, but no one thought to tell me during the process.
Interviews were to start at 8:30 but no one was ready. I ended up cooling my heels in the lobby for more than an hour before people were ready. Finally I was brought into an office and so began a brutal series of two on one interviews. I lost track of how many people I interviewed. Several of the people acted like I was a huge inconvenience and one woman was fairly hostile from the beginning. Many of the people I interviewed with were very nice, but all were pretty serious in their duties to grill me. I felt like I was being interrogated. It was truly exhausting. I believe by the time I was done I had been interviewed by at least 10 people over the course of 6 hours with one 30 minute break.
Combined with the lengthy phone interviews, skills test, etc. I have never been through a more grueling and intensive interview process before in my life. Honestly, by the time I was done, I kind of felt like I had been put through a wine press and wrung out. If the interview process was like this, did I really want to work for this company? At that point, I wasn't sure. I could say a lot more about the interview process but this is long enough already.
Once I was done I came out and my rental car had been ticketed. I took it back in and told them about it and the person who was my liaison while I was there assured me that it would be taken care of. Well, two months later and guess what? Still hasn't been taken care of and the rental care agency has assessed me an additional fee for processing it. Also, Amazon refused to reimburse me for the rental car because I hadn't booked it through their travel agency. This left a bad taste in my mouth.
I was not extended an offer, after all that, but after that interview process and after reading online all the talk about grueling hours and lack of work/home balance I am very glad. Not to mention that I now have a great job with another company at a much higher level and salary than the one that Amazon was offering so it all worked out for me pretty well, considering.
I'm unsure whether or not I would recommend Amazon or not at this point. All I can say to be fair is that my experience was negative but I've read others who didn't feel the same. I'd say that if you are a young, upcoming manager relatively fresh out of college than this might be a good move for you. For someone like myself, who has a lot of experience I'd say no, probably not a good move.