Amazon looks at online tests to replace significant share of physical interview

Amazon is looking to convert a large part of its campus recruitment interviews into online tests, saving time and cost of recruiter and candidate. The company had started it last year, when recruiting interns, reducing the number of interviews from around four to one.

The manpower in the company, around 25,000 in India now, has been growing at 25-30% year-on-year in the past and the company expects to continue the momentum in the near future, said Raj Raghavan, director — human resource, India, Amazon.

“In our campus hiring, we are trying to use a lot more online assessments than physical assessments. That is a big leap. In terms of intern hiring also, we are eliminating a number of interviews to almost one and everything gets tested online,” he said. Earlier it would have been about three or four interviews for these assessments.

He added: “For interns, we are pretty much going down the online assessment route. We will probably do online assessment in campus recruitment too, going forward.” The company hires people with technology skills such as mobile, cloud computing, machine learning, data analytics, among others.

It has combined various aspects of physical interviewing with online assessments to make sure that the time spent by students on being assessed than waiting for meetings to happen is less, he said. A large number of characteristics could be tested online now, for which otherwise the student may need to spend 60 minutes with an interviewer.

While earlier mostly the technical assessments were executed online, now, the non-technical assessments, such as softskills similar to writing skills, can also be carried out online. For instance, one of the abilities that Amazon wants its employees to have is writing skills and it could be tested online instead of a physical test.

Last year, the company had its intern recruitment with more number of online tests and it will continue this year also. However, for campus recruitments, it needs to perfect the process and technology and make sure the colleges it would work with will have the necessary infrastructure for online tests.

“We want to be at a stage when all our entry level technology hiring happens from campuses. We want to get to that at some stage, which means, we need to work with technology, schools a lot closer,” he said. The company is looking at online tests at least in technology colleges.