Your Organization's Principles
Every great interview panel starts with a shared understanding of what you're looking for. Your organization's guiding principles are the lens through which you evaluate candidates.
Why principles matter in interviews
Without principles, interviewers default to gut feel. Each person on the panel looks for something different — one focuses on technical depth, another on "culture fit" (whatever that means), a third on credentials. The result: noise, not signal.
Principles solve this by giving every interviewer a specific angle to evaluate from. When the panel sits down afterward, each person brings data on a different dimension of the candidate. Together, you get a complete picture.
| Without Principles | With Principles |
|---|---|
| Every interviewer asks overlapping questions | Each interviewer owns a specific evaluation area |
| Debrief becomes "I liked them" vs. "I didn't" | Debrief compares evidence against defined criteria |
| Unconscious biases go unchecked | Structured criteria expose gaps in evidence |
| Hard to compare candidates fairly | Consistent framework across all candidates |
Most organizations have guiding principles
Whether your company calls them values, leadership principles, competencies, or core behaviors — most organizations have articulated what they believe makes a great employee. These are the foundation for structured interviewing.
Look for them in:
- Your company's careers page or culture documentation
- Onboarding materials and performance review criteria
- Internal wikis, handbooks, or mission statements
- The qualities your leadership talks about in all-hands meetings
Amazon's Leadership Principles: a well-known example
Amazon's 16 Leadership Principles (LPs) are one of the most widely documented examples of principles-based interviewing. Every Amazon interview is structured around them — each interviewer is assigned specific LPs to evaluate.
Here's how a few of them translate into interview focus areas:
| Leadership Principle | Interview Focus |
|---|---|
| Customer Obsession | Does the candidate start with the customer and work backwards? Do they prioritize user needs over internal convenience? |
| Ownership | Do they take responsibility beyond their immediate scope? Do they think long-term, not just about their team? |
| Dive Deep | Can they go multiple levels into the details? Do they operate at all levels and audit when metrics don't match their intuition? |
| Bias for Action | Do they move quickly on decisions? Can they distinguish reversible from irreversible decisions? |
| Earn Trust | Are they self-critical? Do they benchmark themselves against the best, not just their peers? |
→ Read all 16 Amazon Leadership Principles
Other companies with similar approaches
Amazon isn't alone. Many organizations have published their evaluation frameworks:
- Google uses hiring attributes including "Googleyness" (ambiguity tolerance, collaborative nature, bias to action) alongside role-specific criteria. → How Google Hires
- Netflix built their culture around a Culture Memo emphasizing judgment, communication, curiosity, courage, passion, selflessness, innovation, inclusion, integrity, and impact.
- Microsoft evaluates candidates through a growth mindset lens — the belief that abilities can be developed through dedication and hard work. → Microsoft Culture
- Stripe focuses on qualities like rigor, craftsmanship, and user empathy in their evaluation process.
The specific principles vary, but the pattern is the same: define what you're looking for, then build your interview around finding it.
When your organization doesn't have formal principles
Not every company has a published set of values that map cleanly to interview evaluation. That's okay — you can build your own evaluation framework by identifying the qualities that matter most for success in your team.
Start by asking: What separates the people who thrive here from the people who struggle?
| Quality | What to look for in answers |
|---|---|
| Ownership | "I took responsibility for..." rather than "The team decided to..." |
| Collaboration | Evidence of working across teams, resolving disagreements, building consensus |
| Customer Focus | Decisions driven by user impact, not internal politics or technical elegance |
| Bias for Action | Moving quickly with imperfect information; distinguishing big-door from small-door decisions |
| Technical Depth | Ability to explain complex tradeoffs; evidence of going beyond the surface |
| Learning Velocity | Growth from mistakes; seeking feedback; adapting approach based on new information |
| Communication | Structuring complex ideas clearly; adjusting for audience; written vs. verbal clarity |
These qualities become your evaluation lenses. Assign each interviewer 2-3 qualities to focus on, and suddenly your unstructured panel becomes a structured discovery engine.
Exercise: Define your evaluation lenses
Think about your own organization — or, if you're preparing for a new role, the company you're interviewing with.
Step 1: List 3-5 guiding principles, values, or qualities that define success at your organization. If your company has published values, start there. If not, think about the traits that separate top performers from average ones.
Step 2: For each principle, write one sentence describing what strong signal looks like in a candidate's interview answer.
Example:
- Principle: Ownership
- Strong signal: "The candidate described a situation where they proactively identified a problem outside their direct responsibility, took ownership of the solution, and drove it to completion without being asked."
List 3-5 principles or qualities for your organization, and for each one, describe what strong signal looks like in a candidate's answer.
If your company has published values, use those. If not, think about what separates top performers from average ones on your team. Format: Principle name, then a sentence describing strong signal.
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Why do guiding principles improve interview panel effectiveness?
Your company doesn't have published values. What's the best approach to structuring interviews?
How should principles be distributed across an interview panel?