Here's a little story about Amazon's efficieny from another perspective. When I applied to Microsoft for a summer internship, the process was: go to info sess

Here's a little story about Amazon's efficieny from another perspective. When I applied to Microsoft for a summer internship, the process was: go to info session, submit resume, wait a couple weeks, be asked to schedule an on-campus interview, wait a few days, be invited up to Redmond, schedule flights, fly up to Seattle. Pretty standard, but... When I applied to Amazon, the process was: Go to career fair, hand them my resume, have my resume looked at for ~20 seconds, be asked to write a C-string function on the back, wait a few days, and be invited for a final round interview on campus. The point is that they cut out an enormous amount of overhead by recruiting this way. They probably wouldn't get much information out of a typical first round interview or phone screen that they didn't get by asking me to write that function on my resume and keeping an eye on how long it took me. And rather than fly people up to Seattle, they probably just fly 2-4 interviews down here. Amazon strikes me as a very shrewd company in some ways.