When Ann Hiatt submitted her application for a job as a junior assistant at Amazon, she did not expect much out of it because she had no connections at the company, no computer science degree, and no experience working for a CEO. But, to her surprise, she was called in for an interview.
After a series of interviews with senior assistants, some lasting all day, as Hiatt shared with CNBC, she finally got through to the final interview with Amazon founder Jeff Bezos himself who apparently promised her that he was only going to ask two questions and that the first one would be a brainteaser.
"I took a deep breath as he stood up and uncapped a pen at the whiteboard wall. 'I’ll do the math. I want you to estimate the number of panes of glass in the city of Seattle'," Hiatt told the publication.
"I was momentarily terrified," she said. "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. And then we did the math."
Hiatt said that she felt the exercise took about 10 minutes but she felt it lasted for hours as Bezos filled the whiteboard with numbers.
"I remember feeling a thrill when he wrote down the final estimate. He circled it. 'That looks about right,' he said."
Then came Jeff Bezos's second question -- “What are your career goals?”
Hiatt then explained that she had no idea how to be an assistant, but she knew the importance of being consistently outside of her comfort zone. "I wanted to jump into an astronomical learning and growth curve," she told CNBC. "I told him that Amazon had proven to be a company full of ambitious and passionate people. I wanted to be like them and learn what they knew."
By the end of the interview, Hiatt shared with the publication that she and Bezos both knew that she would do anything to be successful, despite being a very junior candidate and the Amazon boss ended up hiring her on the spot. "He gave me the open desk just three feet away from his own. It was the closest desk to him at the company," she said.
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