Hire and Develop the Best

Hire and Develop the Best is Amazon’s principle that managers should raise the talent bar, recognise exceptional people, coach others seriously, and help employees grow toward their potential.

Key points

• Jassy connects world-class outcomes to teams, not isolated individual brilliance; hiring and development are therefore central management responsibilities ^[src-015].
• Hiring should raise the performance bar with each hire or promotion rather than filling seats by lowering standards ^[src-015].
• Managers are expected to coach, give direct growth feedback, and help people identify what they need to improve ^[src-015].
• The principle treats management as a responsibility to develop leaders, not merely a right to direct work ^[src-015].
• The concept links back to Amazon’s interview system: behavioural evidence and Amazon Leadership Principles help define what “great” looks like in context [src-014, src-015].
• Bar Raiser Hiring is a concrete hiring mechanism that supports this principle: a trained independent interviewer protects the hiring bar, anchors debriefs in Leadership Principles and behavioural evidence, and counters urgency bias ^[src-018].

Related entities

• Amazon — applies the principle in hiring, promotion, and people management
• Andy Jassy — explains the principle in the source video
• Bill Carr — explains the Bar Raiser process in the source interview

Related concepts

• Amazon Leadership Principles
• Bar Raiser Hiring
• Behavioural Interviewing
• STAR Method

Source references

• ^[src-014] Inside Amazon — “STAR Method – How to Ace Your Amazon Interview” (2024-01-26)
• ^[src-015] Inside Amazon — “The Leadership Principles Explained by Amazon CEO Andy Jassy | Full Length Video” (2024-05-21)
• ^[src-018] Lenny’s Podcast — “Unpacking Amazon’s unique ways of working | Bill Carr (author of Working Backwards)” (2023-11-02)