Hi, I'm Nick, and I run Amazon Bound where we help talented job seekers to interview well with Amazon and other companies that practice behavioral interview techniques. I was also a former Amazon Bar Raiser.

And, in today's video, I'd like to answer the question of how you should prepare and present yourself during the Executive Assistant interview with Amazon, during the EA interview with Amazon. This video will fall along the lines of other functional preparation videos that we have recorded on this channel, where we talk about how you prepare for Product Management, Marketing, Engineering, Business Development, and so on and so forth, interviews. And today we're going to tackle the Executive Assistance interview.

There are 3 good main things to keep in mind when you prepare and perform during your EA Amazon interview.

One, just like for any other function, the Number One, most important thing is to start and prepare with your behavioral interview responses. Amazon is going to determine whether to hire you or not based on if you raise their hiring bar. They are going to determine that by asking you behavioral questions, along the lines of 'tell me a case you did X,' 'tell me a time you did Y.' And the best way to respond to these questions is to describe prior accomplishments and failures from your professional career, by using the STAR/SOAR method of describing those accomplishments and failures. So, that is one, the Number One thing to do as you get ready for your Executive Assistant interview with Amazon.

The Number Two thing to do would be to answer hypothetical questions about how you would deal with stress and with high-pressure situations. The best answer to a functional question, to a hypothetical question, is a behavioral answer. So, again, if you have done that in the past, please, describe what you've done. But Amazon will undoubtedly try to find out how you deal with pressure and with concrete situations where multiple dependencies might break, at the same time. And you still need to provide an outcome. You still need to provide a successful result.

As an EA, you would be the right-hand person of the Amazon executive: VP, Director, what have you, who you will be supporting. And, that individual, the person who you're supporting, is going to be torn apart from conflicting stakeholders, timelines, and so on and so forth. They might ask you a question along the lines of: 'imagine your boss needs to go to the offices of a half-a-billion-dollar account in the Midwest, to lock a new AWS contract. On the other hand, Andy Jassy, who's Amazon's CEO, is asking your boss to make it, at the same time, to a Board meeting where they would present a brand new announcement in the strategy of the company.' I made that example up, completely.

And then the third item to keep in mind is to be ready to describe long-term accomplishments that you've had. The flipside of the house-is-on-fire situations is long-term growth and long-term cohesity of the team. How you have achieved those, as an EA. How you have put together maybe a talent bench of other EAs who would inherit your position once you've decided to move on to a different opportunity, so on and so forth.

Along those lines, be ready to answer, again, specific questions about what you've done or what you would do. Good hypothetical question/answer pairs here could be that you have produced a special type of hoodie for every single person on the team. And you were able to do so very frugally, and the design for the hoodie was done by an aspiring artist. And it cost you pennies on the dollar. So now, everybody on the team has that hoodie, and several years later they're still very much loving the hoodie and the sense of camaraderie and team-belonging that the hoodie gives them.

So, again, to recap, the three elements to keep in mind in order to have a successful Executive Assistant interview are: One, nail your behavioral answers with accomplishments and failures from your professional career. Two, be ready to answer specific hypothetical questions about how you've handled pressure-packed situations. And, three, be ready to answer long-term questions where you were able to build either rapport or talent bench or something else along those lines. Where you showed vision and you're able to not just put out the immediate fire but show ownership and look around corners and be the absolute best right-hand person that this particular executive could dream of.

I hope this was helpful. Please, subscribe to this channel if it was. Ask us questions or check out our site at https://amazonbound.today. Best of luck with your EA interview at Amazon. You've got this. Bye.