The Bar Raiser Hiring Process
Put a trained, independent standard-keeper with veto power on every interview loop — and let them run the debrief.
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- 95%
When a company hires fast, new people hire newer people who hire newer people still — and nobody in that chain knows the company's culture or standards, so they default to the criteria they used at their last employer. The bar raiser is a structural fix: an independent, trained interviewer from outside the hiring manager's chain who joins the loop, runs the debrief, enforces objective criteria, and holds a veto over the hire.
Origin
Created at Amazon in 1999 — one of the first of the company's processes — inside the tech org during hypergrowth. Carr credits the concept as borrowed from Microsoft, which had a process called 'as appropriate'. The objective-criteria layer (leadership principles + behavioral interviewing) was added later, once Amazon's leadership principles existed.
Core principles
- 01Personal judgment plus criteria imported from a previous employer is not a hiring standard.
- 02Success at Microsoft, Google, or Facebook does not transfer to Amazon — these companies work very differently.
- 03The bar raiser is independent by construction: not the hiring manager, not in their reporting line, not the recruiter.
- 04The veto exists to shape behavior, not to be exercised — Carr never used his in 15 years and never saw one used.
- 05The hiring manager is the decision-maker; the loop and the bar raiser exist to help them decide well.
How to run it
- 1
Define objective criteria and one interview methodology
Establish company-wide criteria that every interview is scored against — at Amazon, the leadership principles — plus a single methodology, behavioral-based interviewing, so evidence is comparable across interviewers.
Pro tip Behavioral interviewing pairs well with the STAR structure: situation, task, action, result.
Watch out Without criteria, debriefs collapse into gut feel like 'they don't seem to want to work here enough'.
- 2
Select and train bar raisers
Pick people who (a) care a lot about your hiring process, (b) appear to be good interviewers, and (c) seem to have high standards. Train them properly as subject-matter experts on the process itself.
Pro tip It is a great role for people earlier in their career — the added responsibility is a low-risk way to test and develop leadership.
Watch out Budget the cost honestly: Carr spent up to 10 hours a week as a bar raiser. It is a real time suck.
- 3
Place one bar raiser on every loop
Assign a line employee — a software development manager, a marketing manager — who is not the hiring manager, does not report to the hiring manager, and is not the recruiting manager, onto the interview loop.
- 4
Let the bar raiser run the debrief
The bar raiser, not the hiring manager and not the recruiter, chairs the debrief meeting. Their job is to keep the discussion on the objective criteria and adhering to the process, and to use a Socratic method to guide the group toward the right conclusion.
Pro tip A well-run debrief helps the hiring manager see the reasons not to hire, rather than telling them.
Watch out A bar raiser who leans on the veto has already failed at the Socratic part of the job.
- 5
Pilot in one group before scaling
Do not roll this out company-wide on day one. Pick one department, run it there, build the muscle, and expand.
Pro tip Frame it to hiring managers as help, not bureaucracy — the time spent in the loop is trivial next to the time cost of managing a bad hire and the impact on the team.
In the wild
Three or four years into Amazon, growing like a weed, tech leaders noticed a compounding problem: hire a new engineering leader, and their job is immediately to hire senior managers, who hire managers — all of them a week into the company, with no idea of its culture or standards. They fell back on personal judgment plus whatever criteria they'd used at Microsoft.
→ The bar raiser process was created to inject a trained keeper of Amazon's own standards into every loop, so hiring quality did not decay with headcount growth.
The bar raiser technically holds veto power over the hiring manager. Carr was a bar raiser for much of his 15 years at Amazon and neither used the veto nor saw anyone else use it. Its function is to make the debrief a real conversation rather than a rubber stamp.
→ The decision stays with the hiring manager, but the bar raiser's structural authority means the objective criteria are actually enforced.
Common mistakes
Treating the loop as a sales exercise
Hiring managers naturally feel the loop is a bureaucratic group they must sell, standing between them and their candidate. Carr coached new managers out of this: the loop is helping you, because the cost of managing a bad hire dwarfs the cost of the process.
Letting urgency bias set the bar
Every hiring manager is under pressure to fill roles, and the temptation is the next warm body. The bar raiser exists specifically as a counterweight to that bias — ensuring hires meet the standard for culture fit and functional excellence.
Appointing bar raisers without training or commitment
The role only works if the person is a genuine subject-matter expert on the process and the org is dedicated to it. Half-implemented, it becomes an extra interviewer with no authority.
Is it for you?
Best for
Fast-scaling companies where recently-hired managers are now hiring at volume and the standard is visibly drifting.
Not ideal for
Very small teams where the founders are still in every loop and no standards-drift problem exists yet.
From the transcript
“they created this bar raiser process which by the way they borrowed from Microsoft which had a process called as appropriate”
“there's one person who is not the hiring manager who doesn't report to the hiring manager who's not the recruiting manager”
“which by the way a good bar raiser never uses”
“so this often gets confused the decision maker is the hiring manager”
“the urgency bias that every hiring manager has”
“pick people who are a care a lot about your hiring process B appear to be good interviewers uh and C seem to have high…”
From the episode
Unpacking Amazon’s unique ways of working
Bill Carr (author of Working Backwards)