How to Prepare for a Successful Marketing Job Interview at Amazon
If you’ve ever interviewed with big companies like Amazon, or if you haven’t but want to, you know the process can be very intimidating.
Maybe you want to know what questions you’ll be asked, or what the interviewer will be looking for in your response.
Darrell Alfonso, Global Marketing Operations Lead at Amazon Web Services, has been with the company for three years and has hired numerous marketing roles for Amazon and other companies throughout his career.
Darrell has over 10 years of marketing experience, specializing in marketing operations, and I was excited to have the opportunity to chat with him about his experience with Amazon and his perspective in hiring marketing talents.
In our chat, Darrell explains the role of marketing operations in a large company like Amazon, and shares advice on how to prepare for and present information in your marketing interview based on his hiring experiences.
In this interview, you will learn:
What marketing automation and marketing operations are, and the differences between them
Skills needed to specialize in marketing operations roles
Insights on Amazon Leadership Principles, and the types of questions he asks marketing candidates as an interviewer.
Advice on preparing for job interviews and how to provide impressive answers to interview questions
Here’s a glance at this interview…
[2:39] Lydia: What’s the difference between marketing automation and marketing operation?
Darrell: To get a little bit technical, automation is sort of the programmatic execution of many of the promotional aspects of marketing. So you think of automating your emails and automating your lead management processes…
[6:12] Lydia: If someone eventually wants to specialize in marketing operations, what are the really important skills that they need?
Darrell: I will say that if you specialize in skills like marketing automation and, let’s say, data science and analytics, and maybe some surface-level technical marketing or web development, I think there’s a really high demand for those types of roles…
[9:56] Lydia: What kind of positions have you hired for before?
Darrell: I would say kind of a variety. So I definitely, earlier on in my career, used to hire sales development talent and junior-level marketers. I definitely enjoy that because a lot of it doesn’t necessarily lean on experience…
[12:27] Lydia: In your team or department, what Amazon Leadership Principle do you think is the most important?
Darrell: “Customer obsession,” “Deliver results,” and then “Dive deep” are some of my favorites. And I think that at any company, these are very telling questions…
[19:22] Lydia: What kind of questions do you usually ask in the interview?
Darrell: The questions are going to be around past performance. So it’s always going to be framed around “Tell me about an example when…” But I am curious about their marketing automation expertise…
[27:43] Lydia: What is one piece of advice that you would like to tell marketing job seekers?
Darrell: My favorite piece of advice is I actually think that you can do a great job preparing for your job interview by focusing on doing better at your job every day, and here’s what I mean by that…
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