Jeff Bezos instantly hired a candidate after they aced these two unique interview questions

Sometimes, interviews can be so challenging that even a simple question leaves us scrambling for the right answer. Candidates must craft their responses carefully to stand out to recruiters. Ann Hiatt, a former Executive Business Partner to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, shared insights into Bezos' unique interview style. Now a leadership strategist, Hiatt recounted in a 2021 article for CNBC's Make It how she was personally interviewed by Bezos, who was still Amazon's CEO back in 2002.

Although Hiatt wasn't particularly drawn to the tech industry, she decided to try her luck with Amazon, which was still an emerging e-commerce company at the time. Her resume was shortlisted for the role of junior assistant and Hiatt went through her initial rounds of interviews successfully. A few months after her initial rounds, the woman was called in for her final round of interviews. Little did she know that the final interview was with the CEO himself. While Hiatt was surprised about it, Bezos set the tone light by telling her that he only had two questions to ask her and that the first one was a "fun" brainteaser.  

Standing next to a whiteboard, Bezos told Hiatt, "I'll do the math. I want you to estimate the number of panes of glass in the city of Seattle." While this question "terrified" the interviewee at first, she pondered over Bezos' motivation to ask this. She realized that he wanted to test how her "mind worked" and how she could break down a huge problem into small steps. "I outlined how I would start with the number of people in Seattle, which I thankfully correctly guessed as around 1 million, just to make the math easier. Then I said that they would each have a home, a mode of transportation, and an office or school — all of which would have windows. So I suggested that we base the estimate on averages of those," she wrote in her article.  

It took over 10 minutes for Hiatt to guess the answer but when she did, Bezos was pleased and said, "That looks about right." His second question was about Hiatt's "career goals." The candidate spoke about how she was inspired by the "ambitious and passionate" people of Amazon and wanted to be like them. Though she actually wanted to be a professor and had no experience in being an assistant, she wanted to get out of her comfort zone and jump into an "astronomical learning and growth curve." 

Hiatt had a clear understanding of what the then-CEO of Amazon expected from a junior assistant. "He was measuring my potential by asking questions that would explore whether I had the grit, courage and motivation to run at his pace and be brave enough to consistently jump with him and level up," she highlighted. Turns out, Hiatt's answers seemed so convincing to the Amazon founder that he hired her "on the spot." She wanted to do anything to be successful though she was just applying for a junior role. She ended up working at a desk that was the closest to Bezos - just "three feet away" from him- and Hiatt was quite proud of it.