hi i'm gigi an x-bar razer here at day one careers in this video we're going to cover the amazon interview how to come up with stories and because it's exactly the same thing by default we'll also be covering aws interview how to come up with stories now i think this is going to be a two-parter but you know we'll see how it goes so depending on your level and role you're going to probably need between 8 and 20 stories from your career now i appreciate that that is in fact a very wide range so just to explain why briefly for example if you're a junior to mid-level software development engineer you'll only need about eight and that's because the role is mainly tech and you haven't got a huge career behind you you don't and oh sorry on top of that you won't have many interviews but if you are for example an l8 finance director there's no tech element you're expected to have a lot of experience and you could easily have eight to ten separate interviews sorry if you heard a bang my husband's just come home from work but even at the smallest number of eight there's still a significant number of stories that you'll have to come up with now at day one careers we are frequently contacted by candidates with the question how do i even start so there are essentially two different strategies that we think are the easiest ways to create your stories and i'll take you through both of them again probably as a two-parter because editing myself talking for more than 10 minutes so dull anyway anyway i'll tell them tell you them both and then you can decide uh which one works for you two parts remember all right so before you get started on either strategy you part one and part two you have to understand the leadership principles really well this is simply foundational to your ability to create stories because ultimately in both strategies you'll need your stories to strongly demonstrate one or more of the leadership principles you can work on understanding the leadership principles by either reading and dissecting the descriptions of them really closely or if you want to leave nothing open to misinterpretation do a course like ours which will completely deconstruct each of the leadership principles for you literally no brain weren't required if you stay till the end i will give you a free version of one of those courses which i'm sure you'll absolutely love but do hang around for that so once you feel you really have your head around the leadership principles you're ready to start creating stories yay okay the first thing i'll talk to you about i will call working forwards now in this strategy you're going to start from your resume or cv for us europeans although i guess i say europeans but i guess in truth there's like 50 independent sovereign states in europe so if you're in europe and you actually use the word resume and not the word cv let me know in the comments i'd super love to know how the distribution works in in 50 different european countries anyway um hopefully in your resume you will have noted a few critical projects and achievements that you put there because you thought they'd be really impressive now don't go back too far okay pick ones from maybe the last three or three to five years let's say now literally write down what led to those achievements how did the opportunity come about how did you get involved what were you trying to achieve who else was involved what decisions did you have to make what problems did you face what was that outcome literally everything that you can absolutely remember write it out in as much detail as you can remember maybe as if you were telling the story to a friend or a colleague at drinks or dinner once you've completed your story re-read it and ask yourself which of the which two of the 16 amazon leadership principles seem to come out the strongest in that story of course most stories will have multiple leadership principles in them you do need to be kind of strict with yourself and pick only two at most now you've mined your resume for ideas it's time to mine your memory physical and digital think back or use your archives to refresh your memory for other projects or episodes at work in the past three to five years that obviously you need to feel good about your contribution to or your performance in then go through the same process of writing out the full story and then identifying the dominant one or two leadership principles then the last pathway to follow if you can is to speak to colleagues and people in your professional life over the past three to five years and ask them if they have any memories of projects or episodes that they feel you acquitted yourself well in then it's back to the same process of writing out the full story and then identifying the dominant one or two leadership principles now i get that last one is trickier because if you're keeping quiet that you're interviewing or if like me people you work with seem to have moved on and left you behind i don't really know why that seems to happen to me i thought i was quite nice there we go who knows so this one may not be as fruitful for you as the other two pathways at this point you've gathered as many of the standout stories as you can remember now look at them and see which leadership principles you have covered you're very likely to have gaps where you have nothing for some of the 16 amazon leadership principles and other leadership principles maybe we where you have multiples like well more than kind of two potential stories now a brief pause here for a moment before you move on to the next step to reflect on what this picture looks like what does this picture look like in terms of the things you're proud of and what leadership principles they fall into in the main because this is actually a really good overview of where your strengths lie in terms of the leadership principles knowing this and applying for roles where your your key leadership principle strengths are a good match to the critical leadership principles for the role can massively improve your chances of success at interview so keep that as a map aside so if this role doesn't work out you've got a great piece of reference material a tool to find one that is more suited to you so back to creating your stories if you have a number of stories that duplicate the same leadership principle pick your strongest two by process prepare by process of elimination you'll end up with a pool of floating stories now you need to look at these stories and challenge yourself if they can be reframed to align to a leadership principle that you don't yet have a story for having gone through all of these you will probably still be left with some gaps in terms of leadership principles now at this point it's time to stop and ask yourself if you really need to even fill those gaps a way or a couple of ways of answering that question the first is ask your recruiter what's the most important leadership principles for the role or do a deconstruction of your job description to find the key leadership principles there will be a link in the video description or to show you how you can do that and then lastly you could try a cheeky little reach out to some amazonians already doing your type of role and ask them or of course we do offer a service here at day one careers where i can do that for you link again in the description if you then still have gaps to fill it's either about stretching your memory or going back further in time for relevant high impact stories now remember be careful if you're going to go back in time you need to avoid the trap of picking stories from more junior roles that won't meet the complexity requirements of the role that you're interviewing for now so that's it for part one of this video on amazon interview how to come up with stories if you found it useful please do give it a thumbs up and or drop us a comment below and of course head over to part two for the rest if it's up yet now what you need to do is click the link here to claim your free day one careers customer obsession taster course watch that and you'll nail every customer obsession question asked of you in your amazon interview or if you want to do that a little bit later why don't you check out more here of our incredible insights and advice on amazon interview preparation