Ask HN: Is Amazon hiring practice common?

You didn’t sign up for an Amazon machine learning webinar. You signed up to contribute to a lead generation campaign that incidentally included a webinar about machine learning. The main purpose of free webinars and trade shows and so on is lead generation, either to identify possible customers, or possible job candidates, or both.

If you don’t want to get on a mailing list or in a recruiter’s database use a throwaway email address. No one at Amazon or whomever they outsource their lead databases to is looking to see if your email is a work address or not. You’re the product, not the customer.

AMZN is known to be aggressive.

People will post here about their difficulty getting hired at FAANG, they will say "I can't even get an interview."

I'll say "Really... You're not getting interviewed by Amazon?" and they will say, "No, their recruiters are calling me all the time."

And I say "If that wasn't the case I'd be worried that you didn't have a pulse..."

Big companies put candidates into an ATS (applicant tracking system). You've unknowingly put yourself into such a database. Even if you only have them your email, they can basically get the equivalent of your resume from a variety of sources. They also know you're growing your machine learning skills so they can match you to machine learning jobs.

Now, Amazon's army of recruiters are all running queries in their ATS to find candidates to reach out to. There is likely little to no coordination between these recruiters which is why you're getting multiple people reaching out.

Amazon is bananas about recruiter spam. They rejected me late last year which from I understand makes me ineligible to interview for a year. Despite that, I've been e-mailed by 7 different Amazon recruiters in the last 3 months.

I was also spammed by several Amazon recruiters recently. I suspect they hired a bunch of new recruiters and they all got the same leads list.