Jeff Bezos doesn’t just ask his candidates about their resumes and previous employers. He focuses on a different requirement: innovation.
“When I interview people, I ask them to give me an example of something they’ve invented,” the founder of e-commerce giant Amazon said more than a decade ago. Per Bezos, it doesn’t necessarily have to be something taken to the patent office, but it could be a metric or business process the candidate invented and sought after carefully.
Though his advice dates back to 2012, it’s resurfacing on social media. In a world full of thousands of ChatGPT-curated resumes and an oversaturated job market, innovation could be the one thing that can’t be replicated by AI tools.
Innovation is how Bezos keeps his company creative, alongside his candidates adapting problem-solving capabilities.
“You want to select people who like to invent their way out of boxes and don’t necessarily immediately go to either/or—‘we can do A or B.’” Bezos said. “The right question is, ‘How can we do A and B? What invention do we need to be able to do both?’ So that’s a lot about selection.”
The experience, he says, is self-reinforcing. Without the ability to innovate, Bezos says his employees at the now-$2.3 trillion company won’t last long without that skill.
“Someone who comes to Amazon, and doesn’t like pioneering, doesn’t like exploring, doesn’t like going down blind alleys that oftentimes turn out to be dead ends, they’ll leave,” he said.
Bezos’ sage advice is some he’s brought up more recently. In a letter to shareholders in 2015, Bezos wrote: “One area where I think we are especially distinctive is failure. I believe we are the best place in the world to fail (we have plenty of practice!), and failure and invention are inseparable twins.”
“To invent, you have to experiment,” he continued. “And if you know in advance that it’s going to work, it’s not an experiment.”
Innovation as a path to success
Not only is innovation an important requirement for Amazon, it’s become one of the most lucrative ways for companies to succeed. Just as other business leaders like Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates didn’t just build businesses, they transformed existing industries.
“Success today requires the agility and drive to constantly rethink, reinvigorate, react, and reinvent,” Gates says.
Aside from innovation being important to CEOs—its regarded as one of the main drivers of economic growth and activity, with an estimated 50% of annual GDP growth attributed to it, according to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation.
Today, the rise of AI tools serves as a striking example of how fast companies have raced to implement new technologies to stay competitive. While the tools have driven productivity and investment, they’ve also raised concerns about displacing workers vulnerable to automation, a pattern seen before with the internet and other disruptive technologies.
As businesses embrace digital transformation, they are focused on adapting these tools responsibly and incorporating new tools with minimal disruption while maximizing outcomes.
To remain competitive, as Bezos said, is not just about copying what companies do–but being inspired by their approach and making it unique.
“We try to be inspired by it. We say, ‘Okay, take the kernel of that idea—how can we build on it, put an Amazon twist on it, and do something unique and differentiated—not a ‘me too.’”