In his letter to shareholders for 1998, Jeff Bezos counted 2,100 employees and called one thing “the single most important element of Amazon.com’s success”: “Setting the bar high in our approach to hiring.” In hiring meetings, he wrote, people were asked three questions. Will you admire this person? Will this person raise the average level of effectiveness of the group they’re entering? Along what dimension might this person be a superstar?
“We want to fight entropy,” he added. “The bar has to continuously go up.”
The trouble was who was doing the hiring. Bill Carr, who joined Amazon in 1999 and later co-wrote Working Backwards with Colin Bryar, recalled the problem on Lenny’s Podcast in 2023 by quoting a senior leader: “We had new people hiring new people hiring new people.” The company was three or four years old and, in Carr’s words, “growing like a weed.” In the tech organization, a newly hired engineering leader would hire senior managers, who would hire managers, and “all these people have been here for a week,” Carr said. They didn’t know the company’s standards yet.
The answer, launched in 1999 for tech job candidates, was first called the Barkeeper Program. Amazon later renamed it, because keeping a standard wasn’t the point. Every hire, the company says, should be better than 50 percent of the people already in similar roles.
On every interview loop, Carr explained, one interviewer was not the hiring manager, did not report to the hiring manager and was not the recruiter. That person, the Bar Raiser, ran the debrief. In Brad Stone’s 2013 account, Bezos and Rick Dalzell, a former Army Ranger Bezos had recruited, handpicked the program’s first leaders, and a bar raiser could veto a candidate who did not raise the company’s overall hiring bar. “Even the hiring manager was unable to override a bar raiser’s veto,” Stone wrote. Dalzell’s reasoning, as Stone quotes it: “Many companies as they grow begin to compromise their standards in order to fill their resource needs.”
Carr, who served as a Bar Raiser himself, described the veto differently. “A good Bar Raiser never uses” it, he said: “in my 15 years at Amazon I never used it, never saw it used.” The decision stayed with the hiring manager. The Bar Raiser’s job was to keep the debrief on the agreed criteria and to “act as a balance also on the urgency bias that every hiring manager has,” the pull to fill the role with “the next warm body.”
It cost time. Carr called it “a huge time suck,” sometimes up to 10 hours of his week. Bar Raisers are volunteers, nominated by colleagues, and Fortune reported they get no extra pay. Amazon says their training takes from three months to a year. By October 2019 there were 3,600 of them.
During the pandemic hiring boom, Fortune reported in August 2024, Amazon removed bar raisers from the interviews for its entry-level software engineering jobs. In 2024, according to an internal memo obtained by Business Insider, it put them back. Reinstating them, the memo said, “is addressing a direct business need and aims to enhance the quality of SDE-1 candidates hired.” Amazon declined to say whether dropping them had led to weaker hires.