Ask HN: Is Amazon hiring practice common? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is Amazon hiring practice common?

3 pointsnepalvibes6 comments

I signed up for a webinar hosted by Amazon relating to machine learning 6-8 months ago. I used my work email thinking it would be useful for my employer.

Since then I've reached emails from 9 different Amazon recruiters for Software Engineer role to my work email. Reaching out to me on my work email looks very odd to me.

I tried responding to 4 or 5 of the recruiters to take me off the list but no one responds to my email. Finally 9th recruiter responded and promised me to take my email off their list.

Is this a common hiring practice?

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You didn’t sign up for an Amazon machine learning webinar. You signed up to contribute to a lead generation campaign that incidentally included a webinar about machine learning. The main purpose of free webinars and trade shows and so on is lead generation, either to identify possible customers, or possible job candidates, or both.

If you don’t want to get on a mailing list or in a recruiter’s database use a throwaway email address. No one at Amazon or whomever they outsource their lead databases to is looking to see if your email is a work address or not. You’re the product, not the customer.

AMZN is known to be aggressive.

People will post here about their difficulty getting hired at FAANG, they will say "I can't even get an interview."

I'll say "Really... You're not getting interviewed by Amazon?" and they will say, "No, their recruiters are calling me all the time."

And I say "If that wasn't the case I'd be worried that you didn't have a pulse..."

Big companies put candidates into an ATS (applicant tracking system). You've unknowingly put yourself into such a database. Even if you only have them your email, they can basically get the equivalent of your resume from a variety of sources. They also know you're growing your machine learning skills so they can match you to machine learning jobs.

Now, Amazon's army of recruiters are all running queries in their ATS to find candidates to reach out to. There is likely little to no coordination between these recruiters which is why you're getting multiple people reaching out.

Amazon is bananas about recruiter spam. They rejected me late last year which from I understand makes me ineligible to interview for a year. Despite that, I've been e-mailed by 7 different Amazon recruiters in the last 3 months.

You didn't get rejected from Amazon, you got rejected for a particular role. Companies recruit and interview for roles individually. You could very likely pass an interview with another team. Who knows. Usually 6-12 months after failing an interview is long enough for them to feel comfortable reaching out to you again.

I was also spammed by several Amazon recruiters recently. I suspect they hired a bunch of new recruiters and they all got the same leads list.

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