Amazon CEO, Jeff Bezos, the richest person in the world is worth an estimated $110 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
He founded Amazon as an online bookstore from his garage on July 4, 1994 after quitting his Wall Street job and moving to Seattle, Washington. Amazon had only a team of 10 in 1995, and Bezos was still driving packages to the post office himself during that period.
During that period Bezos asked job candidates for their SAT scores, The Atlantic's Franklin Foer reported. The SAT is a standardized test widely used for college admissions in the United States. “Setting the bar high in our approach to hiring has been, and will continue to be, the single most important element of Amazon.com’s success,” wrote Bezos about Amazon’s workforce.
Most people would think that their SAT scores don't matter after college, but most people aren't Jeff Bezos.
The Amazon founder would ask every job candidate how they scored on the standardized test before submitting them to a Socratic-style interrogation, The Atlantic's Franklin Foer reported in a profile of the CEO published in the magazine's November issue.
Bezos believed that candidates' SAT scores were a reflection of their intelligence, according to The Atlantic.
But SAT scores were not the only technique that Bezos relied on to measure a candidate's intelligence. Bezos also asked open-ended questions in the Socratic style, such as "Why are manhole covers round?" to measure how logical candidates were, The Atlantic reported.
The fifth employee that Bezos hired, Nicolas Lovejoy, told Wired's Chip Bayers in 1999 that the CEO was "very, very picky" with who he hired. "One of his mottos was that every time we hired someone, he or she should raise the bar for the next hire, so that the overall talent pool was always improving," Lovejoy told Wired.
Bezos also questioned the other interviewers about their impressions of the candidate and made charts of candidates' resumes on a whiteboard, Lovejoy told Wired.