Former Amazon Executive Bill Carr explains the “bar-raiser” hiring process

So the bar raiser hiring process was pretty early in the company's history, back in 1999. And we created it for a simple reason. To quote one senior leader at Amazon, we had new people hiring new people, hiring new people. We were in our hyper growth phase. Okay? The company was only, you know, what, three, four years old. And we were growing like a weed at that point. So how do we fix this problem other than letting it run rampant and basically hire a bunch of people who are. We don't know if they fit our culture and we don't know if they fit our high standards we have for what we expect of engineering leaders or engineers. So they created this bar raiser process. And the concept was that on every interview loop, there's one person who is not the hiring manager, who doesn't report to the hiring manager, who's not the recruiting manager. They are on the interview loop and they're a bar raiser. Which means when we get to the debrief meeting, they will run that meeting. Not the hiring manager, not the recruiter, they will run the meeting. And it also means that they technically have veto power over the hiring manager, which. Which by the way, a good bar raiser never uses or I never saw a bar raiser used. I was a bar raiser and in my 15 years at Amazon, I never used it, never saw it used. And then finally, which actually was Not True in 1999, but later became true, was once we established our leadership principles, we created a set of objective criteria that would be used and an interview methodology that would be used in every interview. The objective criteria would be our leadership principles and the methodology would be behavioral based interviewing. So this bar raiser was basically would be a subject matter expert on how this process worked. They'd conduct the debrief to make sure that we were actually adhering to the process, that people were sticking to the objective criteria, rather than saying, I don't think we should hire this person because I don't know, they don't seem to want to work here enough. Maybe that's a valid reason, but it's actually not part of our objective criteria. And so the bar raiser was there to act as a balance. Also on the urgency bias that every hiring manager has, which is like, I got to fill these roles, but rather than filling them with the next warm body they find, make sure they fill them with people who fit our culture and meet our standards for, you know, functional excellence. The whole interview loop and the bar raiser are actually just there to help the hiring manager make the right decision. Now. Oftentimes the hiring manager could feel like this is actually a bureaucratic process and a group of people that I have to sell and they're just in my way between me and hiring this person, which is kind of a natural feeling to have. But one of the feedback I would always give managers who are new to this is like, no, no, no, that's not the way to think about it. Think about these people are helping you because the amount of time you're going to put into the hiring process may seem like a lot, but if you hire the wrong person, boy, that amount of time you're going to have to deal with managing that person. That's going to be a lot more the impact on the team impact on you. So making a great decision here is important. They're here to help you. So yes, the final decision was with the hiring manager. Technically speaking, the barrier could block them from a decision to hire someone, but they would allow, well done. They would help the hiring manager see the reasons not to hire the person through kind of a Socratic method and how they would guide the discussion. It is a huge time suck. It sometimes could be up to 10 hours of my week spent actually as a bar raiser. It's also a great role for people who are earlier in their career by giving them this additional sort of leadership opportunity. It's a great way to grow and develop leaders, by the way, because this added responsibility is a great way for them to start testing out leadership and you have to train them properly and you have to have dedication to the process.