Amazon's Bar Raiser: a trained outside interviewer with veto power guards every hire

In the late 1990s Amazon was growing so quickly that it could not hire enough people, and Brad Stone's The Everything Store records how tempting it was to rationalize 'a warm body is a warm body'. Amazon's core values included a 'high bar for talent', and in his 1998 shareholder letter Jeff Bezos told interviewers to ask three questions before any offer: would you admire this person, would they raise the average effectiveness of the group, and along what dimension could they be a superstar?

To make that bar stick, Amazon adapted Microsoft's senior-interviewer idea and formalized its own version in the 1999 hiring plan for tech candidates, initially called the Barkeeper Program. Bar Raisers are skilled interviewers who are nominated and undergo lengthy training; they typically come from outside the team doing the hiring, so they act as objective third parties and stewards of Amazon's Leadership Principles.

The power that made the role famous was the veto: a Bar Raiser can reject a candidate who does not meet the goal of raising the company's overall hiring bar, and even the hiring manager cannot override it. Amazon's own description makes the ambition concrete — every person hired should be better than 50% of those currently in similar roles, so each hire literally 'raises the bar'.

The practice outlived the growth crisis that created it. Amazon still publishes guides for applicants explaining how Bar Raisers fit into interviews, and CEO Andy Jassy still cites the hiring system as 'one of Amazon's crown jewels'.