Job Search 12: My Written Assignment
This time last week, I was working on an 8,000-character answer to one of the Amazon Written Assignment prompts. In today’s article, I am going to walk you through my approach. (Paying customers get to look at my full answer. If you want to see it, consider subscribing to my interview prep newsletter.) Note: Those 8k characters include spaces. (I only discovered this limit included spaces when I put my story in the required submission tool.)
The Prompts
You must select between two prompts: Are Right, A Lot or Invent & Simplify.
Are Right, A Lot
Most decisions are made with analysis, but some are judgment calls are not susceptible to analysis due to time or information constraints. Please write about a judgment call you’ve made in the last year or two that couldn’t be analyzed. It can be a big or small one, but should focus on a business issue.
What was the situation, the alternatives you considered and evaluated, and your decision-making process?
Do not include any confidential or proprietary information from current/past employers.
Invent and Simplify
What is the most inventive or innovative thing you have done? Describe something that was your idea, such as a process change, a product idea, a new metric, or a novel customer interface.
It does not need to be something that is patented.
Do not write about anything your current or previous employer would deem confidential information.
Provide relevant context for us to understand the invention or innovation. What problem were you seeking to solve, and what was the result? Why was it an important problem to solve? How did it make a difference to the business or organization?
General Amazon’s Writing Guidelines
Write in the style you would use to write a business whitepaper or essay. Do not use bullet points, graphics, tables, charts, or flow charts.
Do not include any confidential or proprietary information from current/past employers.
Remember as you write that the reader may not be familiar with specific technical terminology, corporate cultures, and scenarios. Use language and descriptions in your response that enable readers to fully understand the situation.
Please limit your response to 1-2 pages (no more than 8000 characters, this includes spaces).
You may draft your response directly into the form, or you may draft it into a word processor and copy and paste it into the form. If you choose to copy and paste, please note that you will lose any unsupported formatting (e.g., bullets, highlights, color-coded text, graphics).
Your writing will be evaluated on two primary criteria:
Your clarity of thought and expression (i.e., Did you explain your point well?)
The organization and structure of your response (i.e., Does your response flow? Does it make sense?)
How I selected my story?
I followed a two-prong process to selecting my story:
Asking do I have anything that will work.
How to narrow down the options, where something would work?
My current case is. a bit unique, the time constraint on the Are Right, A Lot prompt meant I couldn’t use it, even if I had a great example because all my examples were 2+ years old, given that I have focused on running my business for the last 2+ years. I am applying for a job where I need to work at scale with executives, anything I could use from my current business would fall flat. Many reading this might also need to skip this one because they too had a role — for different reasons — where making a decision without data wasn’t really viable or a good story.
Next, I had to narrow to a story that will be relevant. I know the rules, I can’t repeat stories, this includes your writing assignment. To my surprise, this time around, some of my interviewers were okay with me using elements of my written assignment during the onsite. During the last onsite, my interviewer nearly bit my head off when I tried referring to my writing assignment, so to be safe, you need to be prepared for whatever you write to be off the table.
To narrow, I created the audit I shared last week and picked out the story I was willing to give up for my onsite. Unfortunately, I was limited in my options, so I didn’t have much of a choice. I needed:
Something with scope, impact, visibility, conflict, and scale.
Enough details I remembered
Something that wasn’t from Amazon or before Amazon.
See Scope and Impact above, for L7+ that isn’t negotiable.
Not rob myself of needed onsite messaging
I finally picked one of my favorite stories. Ironically, the reason I love it as a story I couldn’t even leverage because I didn’t have enough characters left. It is one of my failure and success stories, it has everything.
How I wrote it
I sat down and just started writing. I let myself tell the story I wanted. About 1 hours in, I put my notes in Google Docs so that I could have the character count in the left-hand side to know where I was at all times.
I needed to go over the character count before I could cut anything. When I realized spaces counted, I had to remove one of my favorite parts of the story just before I hit submit.
I followed the rules strictly. I didn’t show it to anyone. BUT I did let my phone read it to me, so I could see how it sounded and edit from there. I used bolding as a creative tool to make it readable without bullet points.
I did some public research on the company size and revenue at the time so that I could add metrics to my story that were safe to use, so it could be more Amazonian than it might have otherwise been.
I kept checking to make sure it was clear and had: scope, impact, visibility, conflict, and scale.
As of writing this, I don’t know if I made it or not. Next week, I will share more about my experience (For 4 hours after the first two interviews, I wanted to throw up. Yes, Amazon is that stressful. Next, I will explain why.)
