I had the pleasure of working with Siobhan and the SER Consulting team while building out the Amazon Fresh and Prime Now Organizations in Irvine, CA. Both of these were brand new businesses that we building from scratch. SER is one of the most amazing recruiting partners I’ve ever worked with. We had beyond aggressive hiring goals, tasked by our VP to hire and onboard as fast as possible. Within a year we had a 65+ Amazon Fresh organization with excellent bench strength and leadership. SER’s out of the box thinking led to new scaled recruiting tactics that I had no yet seen at Amazon. Two years later we did the same thing for the Amazon Prime Now Organization in Irvine as well, settling in with a team of 60 after 18 months.
She put together training for my interview team that led to two amazing outcomes. First, our interviewers were really able to assess our DEI candidates much better than before, which led to an extremely diverse and inclusive team. Second, our interviewers became a lot more comfortable evaluating technical and leadership qualities, which accelerated our hiring ability by reducing false positives early on in the funnel, and removing false negatives during hiring decision time.
SER also targeted markets that we hadn’t reached out to before, and we ended up bringing in a some high caliber talent from places like Utah and Nevada that ended up relocating to California. Lastly, SER instituted a streamlined code challenge and batched event process which enabled us to interview 30+ candidates onsite monthly which greatly aided in achieving our aggressive goals.
In addition to all of the above, SER helped build a strong brand for my organizations in Irvine. They put together a Woman in Engineering event, inviting amazing guest speakers, and organizing the top notch catering. We had over 200 women there that were beyond impressed with the richness of the content (not to mention how amazing the food was)!
After I left Amazon, Siobhan took her success and turned it into mechanism that scaled across many groups at Amazon. Siobhan has really left a mark of hiring top-tier talent, building teams that really understand how to build a great diversity funnel, and create events that led to a much needed refresh on Amazon’s recruiting brand.
