Referrals are a way for an existing employee to endorse someone who wishes work at Amazon. An endorsement does not guarantee an interview, however with any large sized companies, referrals are a really nice way to increase the chances that your resume at the least gets screened by a recruiter. Most people are aware of this benefit of referral. With platforms like Quora/LinkedIn, it has also become very easy for someone to discover present employees at any of the firms, however I'd like to point out a few flaws with a blind approach for a referral.

The referral process has some benefits for me as well as the candidate who I am referring. For me if the candidate I referred clears the interviews and decides to join Amazon, I get some bonus money. I am not too sure about the exact amount and it anyway keeps changing. For me the motivation is not really earning the additional X dollars from the referral bonus. The intent is to help others achieve their dreams. Referrals are also supposed to help Amazon filter candidates and reach out to those selected folks who have been endorsed by employees already working there. Hence, as an employee I have certain responsibilities to filter the referral requests and make an informed choice about who I want to refer.

I get about 5 new requests each day on LinkedIn/Quora where students and professionals ask me to look at their resume and help them with referrals. As much as I would like to help each of you, my time is limited. Hence more often than not, I might not be able to even reply to your messages on time. In this post I would like to jot down how I would want people to approach someone for referrals by giving some examples of what one should and shouldn’t do while making an approach.

I find above request to be pretty effective because of the below reasons.

• Straight way makes the point that there is interest to obtain a referral. A lot of times I get messages like “Hi Sir”, “Hi Sir, How are you?”.
• One may have a lot of achievements. Listing down the top three is a really nice way to convey your point about why you deem yourself as suitable for a referral.
• Additionally you could back your proficiency in competitive coding by providing ratings on Codeforces/Codechef. If you not into competitive programming, you could talk about if you are prepared for the role by citing “Solved X problems on InterviewBit, Y problems on LeetCode”.

Now let’s see some type of requests that one should absolutely avoid.

Unfortunately, majority of the requests that I get is of this sort. Let’s see the reasons why this form of request is not effective.

• “Very good in data structures and algorithm” - The statement has no credibility.
• There is an attached resume but I wouldn’t really download this. At max I will visit your LinkedIn profile (if I can access). The resume will be used once I have made my mind to refer you.

My apologies to the many people who I have not been able to reply. Hope this post provides some perspective on how to effectively approach someone for a referral. The ideal approach request should have the below information,

1. A two liner introduction about yourself.
2. Your top-3 achievements.
3. A list of 3–4 Job Ids that you consider yourself suitable for. All leading companies have a careers website where you can surf suitable jobs and find the Job Id. Here is Amazon’s job portal
   [1]
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4. Your resume. I will only be using this to put in the referral. For most instances, I trust your word when you describe your achievements.

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