Placement Stories: Amazon Area Manager [On Campus]
Written on February 1st , 2020 by {"login"=>"jcbitshyd", "email"=>"journal@hyderabad.bits-pilani.ac.in", "display_name"=>"Journal Club, BPHC", "first_name"=>"", "last_name"=>""}With this profile holding the record for the highest non-tech CTC this placement season, the job description for this role explains that an Area Manager at Amazon leads a team of 50 - 200 people at one of Amazon’s fulfilment centres (warehouses). The interviews for this role happened in January, and ten applicants were shortlisted for interviews after a test. Of the ten shortlisted candidates, five were from Mechanical Engineering branch, two from Manufacturing, two from civil, and one from Chemical Engineering, Only two students managed to clear the interviews and were offered jobs: Aditya Ramaswami and Abhinav Sparsh.
What other companies did you apply for?
Aditya (AR): I applied for most of the non-tech companies that I was eligible for - Dalberg, PhonePe, Media.net, ZS, Dunzo, Flipkart, and a couple more. I think Amazon was around the eight or ninth company I applied for.
Abhinav Sparsh (AS): Mostly the same - I applied for all the non-tech roles that came to campus this semester. I couldn't apply for Dalberg last semester because I was in PS2 and couldn't come back to campus. Amazon was the second company I was shortlisted for, the first one being Indus Insights.
Why were only people from mechanical, manufacturing and civil allowed to apply for this role if it is non-tech? Were there any technical components in the process?
AR: The Area Manager role probably requires some knowledge of supply chain management and project management, both of which are courses from the Mechanical/Manufacturing department (probably Civil Engineering too). I wasn’t really grilled on these subjects during the interview though. While it would be incorrect to call this a tech role, you could, perhaps, consider it to be something in the middle - a little bit of core skills, but a lot of managerial and leadership skills required.
AS: Not sure, really - I'm from Civil Engineering and there were almost no questions related to core/tech. Most of the questions asked were things that I mentioned in my resume - I did have one project in my core discipline (Civil) but I was able to explain it properly.
What was the interview process for Amazon Area Manager like?
AR: The interview process consisted of one written round, followed by three rounds of interview. The first round was a written round that tested quantitative and verbal ability, a little bit of logical reasoning and some domain related questions. The domain related questions were mainly from Supply Chain Management and Project Management along with a little bit of Lean Manufacturing.
In all three of the interview rounds, I was asked about things in my resume. However, each interviewer focussed on a different parts of my resume. In the first round of interviews, the skills section was the focus. After a couple of questions on Excel, he gave me a small case study to solve then and there. In the second round, the focus was on my PoRs and a couple of hypothetical questions to test management and leadership abilities. One hypothetical that I was asked was along the lines of: “There’s a festival today and almost fifty of your delivery executives (out of hundred) don’t show up. How would you handle this?”. The first two rounds happened face-to-face, but the last round of interviews was a telephonic conversation with someone probably in upper management. This last round was mainly focussed on my work experience.
AS: The written round was basically a test of speed - really simple questions that anyone can do. When I say easy, I mean very easy. "Look at the given string below and count the number of times letter 'a' is followed by 'b' in the string". However, there were a lot of them. For the first two interview rounds, there were two panelists. If your first interview was taken by panelist #1 you would have to go to the other panelist in round two. Unlike for Ramaswami, there were huge gaps of time between subsequent rounds for me. By the time the first two rounds were complete for me, it was very late in the evening and the third round of interview couldn't be conducted that day. I was the only applicant whose round 3 wasn't complete that day from Hyderabad Campus. My third round of interview happened two days later at 3PM, and I got to know that I got the job around three hours after that.
Now, coming to what happened in the interviews. The first panelist skipped the internship section of my resume and mostly started asking me about my projects. One of the projects in my resume was related to the course Business Analysis and Valuation (BAV) related to Porter's Five Forces. The second round of interview concentrated on my internship (PS2) experience, though he did ask me about my projects a bit. Unlike other candidates who got mini-case studies and stuff in their interviews, all of my interviews were general discussions + resume. Round #3 was a telephonic/video-call with someone from an Amazon office abroad - the call lasted about an hour.
How will you rank each of these, and why, in increasing order of importance, for getting a non-tech job on campus: a) overall CGPA, b) work experience (such as PS1, PS2, and other internships), and c) extracurricular activities and competitions d) PoRs?
AR: For most of the interviews I gave, work experience, followed by my PoR seemed to be the most discussed thing during the interview. I was asked a lot of questions about the work I did in my internships, as well as a couple of questions on course projects. The only place where CGPA mattered was to clear the cutoff required to apply for the job. I was never asked to explain or defend any of my low grades during any real interview - the only place that came up was in the mock interview that was organised by the Placement Division. Extracurriculars - again, not very important.
AS: I'm not exactly sure about this. It's general belief that having a CG too high or too low can hurt your chances for non-tech roles. 9+ CG or a CG less than 7 might just harm your prospects. Having too high a CG might make them wonder why you're even applying for a non-tech role when you're clearly strong at tech/core discipline. Work experience: PS1 might not matter a lot. But again, during the interviews, I was asked a question on my work at Ultratech Cement (during PS1) since I'd mentioned in my resume that my role there was people management. Extracurriculars - I mentioned trekking and gaming. The only thing you need to remember is that out of your extracurriculars, internship experience, and PoRs you need to be able to explain your story - what exactly did you do? Why did you do that - explain your decision making process? What challenges did you face and what hard choices did you have to make?
Do you think having a Position of Responsibility (PoR) helps a lot for non-tech roles? [Note: Aditya Ramaswami was the Secretary of ELAS during AY 2018-19 and publicity head for BITSMUN].
AR: This is a very debated question - a lot of people who’ve held PoRs will say that it did help them, and in my case it did. I think it definitely did give me a small edge because a PoR indicates that you have some leadership skills, at the very least. However, you need to prove to them that you’ve gotten results when you were in-charge and explain what exactly your role in that was. With ELAS, as the head of Verba Maximus, I was able to give them numbers and statistics - in one of the interviews my interviewer asked me for the balance sheets of the fest and I had to explain the finances of VM then and there. A PoR does help - but not having a PoR is not a deal-breaker. If you have a decent PoR, make sure to bring it up in the interview.
AS: The only position of responsibility I held was when I was part of Fraglore OC around two years ago and was handling off-campus teams' accommodation and logistics. This did come up in the interview when we were discussing customer service in the context of this PoR, and I had to explain how I handled a situation involving off-campus participants having difficulties with accomodation. PoRs might give you something to talk about, but by themselves, are not of tons of use.
Does completing a minor in Finance give you an edge during non-tech interviews?
AR: In general, no. The maximum you’ll be asked is very basic finance (not even stuff as difficult as covered in FoFA), and that too very rarely. It might, to some extent, depend on the type of the role as well - consulting companies (such as Indus Insights) might ask you a little bit of finance.
AS: No. I didn't even mention it in my resume. The only thing I mentioned was a project related to BAV that I did, and I was asked questions about that. Before adding all the finance courses to your resume, try to identify which ones seem the most relevant for the role and only add things that you are confident about. There's a decent chance that a panelist might have a background in finance, and grill you on things if you mention these. Since it is not super required for the role, you have nothing much to gain specifically from emphasising your finance skills.
How did you build your profile for this role and how did you prepare for interviews? What sort of skills do companies look for?
AR: You need to start preparing well in advance of the placement season. You can't expect to walk into campus when placements start and then start preparing. If you’re planning to sit for placements in the first semester, you should probably start preparing a little every day from late-March onwards, and October onwards for second-semester placements. Since I was preparing for CAT, I didn’t have to specifically prepare for the written rounds of tests. When it comes to skills the first thing they test is your aptitude - are you good at guesstimates? Given some numbers and a problem can you crunch the numbers fast enough? Apart from this, they expect you to have some basic skills like MS Excel and SQL, and occasionally Python. I kind of think it’s a myth when people say coding is not needed much for non-tech roles - all other things equal, companies would prefer the person who knows the basics of coding over the person who doesn’t. Companies definitely expect you to have really good communication skills and about 70-80% of the non-tech companies that come for placements on campus have a group discussion round to filter out candidates.
AS: Preparing for interviews: before applying for any company do a couple of quick Google searches to find out the basics of the company and if possible, try to talk to people already working inside the organisation to get a basic idea of the culture. For Amazon, a good starting point would be to take a look at the fourteen leadership principles (link) on their website. When you're preparing try to think about each of the principles and relate it to your experiences over the year - were there any occasions in which you had to apply one of these principles? A decent part of the interview process revolved around these fourteen principles - try to find one story from your life that revolves around each principle and when you're talking to the interviewer and try to tie back to the principles whatever you're saying. You asked earlier about PoRs, extracurriculars and internships - use your experiences in all of these to find relevant examples to talk about for each of the principles. Almost all of the fourteen principles were discussed in some form or the other across the three rounds of interview - so make sure to know your company.
Anything else you’d like to tell people sitting for placements next year?
AR: Start prepping early, and don’t give up hope in the middle of the placement season. Almost everyone comes to placement season hoping to bag a job in the very first week. However, not a lot of people manage to do that - with the batch size almost doubling next year this is bound to be a bigger problem then. Don’t give up - just keep giving interviews.
AS: Try to stand out from the crowd. This can begin with as simple a thing as perhaps taking a color print of your resume instead of a B/W print. 100s of people would've done the same (or similar) finance projects you've done. Try to make them sound different. Emphasise on how you are unique. When the interviewers ask you if you have any questions about Amazon at the end try to ask insightful stuff and not the generic questions they're expecting like "How's life like at Amazon?". When they asked me about this in the end, I started a small chat with the interviewer on why Amazon acquired Twitch a couple of years ago - I knew about this since I was into gaming and Twitch is a live video streaming service. Try to stay calm and don't worry about things too much - worrying almost never helps.
Interviewed by Rohit Dwivedula.