Amazon Recruiter Training Academy

A Little History

Everyone is familiar with the success of Amazon. It was founded by Jeff Bezos in Bellevue, Washington, on July 5, 1994. The company started as an online marketplace for books but expanded to sell electronics, software, video games, apparel, furniture, food, toys, jewelry, and pretty much anything else you can imagine. Amazon grew to become the largest Internet company by revenue in the world.

Why I Was Hired

The manager of the Recruiter Academy Program (RAP) discovered that after version 1 of the program, the two trainers hadn’t developed any usable training materials for version 2 of the program 2 months before the 2nd cohort was due to begin. To be fair, the trainers were two highly successful recruiters who’d been asked to teach the course the first time out. They didn’t know anything about creating an actual training program.

I was hired but there was a glitch in the approval system that prevented me from getting through the system and onboarded for several weeks. By the time I was allowed to begin working, I had about 5 weeks to create materials needed for the program. It put me under a great deal of pressure to deliver. On top of that, my primary subject matter expert felt so pressured by the needs of the program, that she decided to take off for a week to Europe. She did tell me but didn’t tell our manager, who wasn’t happy.

What I Did

I worked as a Program Manager and Instructional Designer for Amazon’s Recruiter Academy Program.

For each course I developed, I created a PPT, a Readme.Doc, and a Word Document. I’ve attached a sample of each below:

• Recruiter Academy Program Events Model PPT (PDF)
• Recruiter Academy Program Events Model Word Doc (PDF)
• Recruiter Academy Program Events Model ReadMe (PDF)

The Environment I Worked In

The Recruiter Academy was a 26-week program that taught 18 students the Event Recruiting Process Model as used at Amazon. I was able to meet the needs of the current program and to “productive” the entire program for Global release. Today, any recruiting team in the world can take the “productized” version on the sandbox and install it for any Amazon Technical Recruiting Team world-wide, and ramp-up to teach recruiters event-model recruiting.

Accomplishments

• Developed a syllabus for a 26-week technical Recruiter Training Program’s event-recruiting process.
• Created over 20 courses (Word, PPTs, Job Aids, and supporting materials) in under 4 mos.
• Created Wiki and SharePoint infrastructure to deliver courses.
• Created separate Wiki and SharePoint infrastructure that could be published from review and student sandbox courses.
• Created a separate infrastructure to use in downloading each new course.
• Reduced their resume review training from approximately 10-12 hours per course to about 2 hours by creating handouts with shortcuts on what to look for on resumes when sourcing for specific jobs. (See Job Aides below,)

More Links to Items I Developed

• Introduction to SharePoint training – The documentation set included a ReadMe.doc, PPT, and Word document but only the document is included.
• Job Aides: I created these Core Requirement job aides for three roles. They are on 4×6″ laminated cards and helped recruiters who unfamiliar with specific skill sets of desired candidates to quickly look them up and find the right skillsets for the right roles. They turned out to be very popular and even recruiters who didn’t graduate from the program heard about them and started to request them.
  • Software Developer Engineer II L5
  • Software Developer Manager L5/L6
  • Technical Program Manager L5/L6

Other Accomplishments

• Increased the number of potential candidates that could be screened per day.
• Created Word training to make it easier for potential recruiters to easily troubleshoot not just the auto-mail-process, but other parts of the process when recruiters when try to generate an email list of people to contact for job openings.
• Created and Taught SharePoint training on a custom recruiter site I developed.
• Streamlined procedures, steps, and other processes to help recruiters do their jobs faster and with more accuracy.

Greatest Experiences I Had

• Work closely with the students in the cohort which I found I really enjoyed and I found out I liked teaching much more than I realized. I ended up teaching a couple of classes myself while I was working in this role.
• Know and help grow 18 technical recruiters at Amazon.
• I grew to appreciate their program with football teams to retrain injured players to become recruiters and their spouses and met some people who really touched me in the process.
• Made friends in this business unit and since I’d just moved back to Seattle after 14 years of being away, it was a great comeback.