Amazon Executive Assistant interview questions

Participated in an e-mail interview that went well and was given a time for a phone interview. The phone interviewer never called me, so I contacted my previous contact to reschedule. At that point they informed me the position had already been filled. I do wish they had let me know ahead of time so I wouldn't have wasted my time waiting for the phone call that never came. It also seemed unprofessional to me to fill a position without meeting all of the candidates you had scheduled to interview.

What I found is the following: There doesn't seem to be a work-life-balance culture there. They pride themselves on 'being like Google' but they are not like Google. Many of the Executive Assistants, not ALL, but many were sharks and you could already tell that to fit into their club you had to be just as unpleasant, bossy, and passive aggressive as they were to fit into the role. Questions that they ALL kept asking were: What is your experience with Microsoft Outlook, can you manage a calender, how exactly do you create a to-do list and execute that list and how do you prioritize. Even after I put on a Vanna White show in front of a white board where I proceeded to create a sample calender of a week, including multiple task lists of sample items that I would normally attack and how I would execute and prioritize those tasks, I found them to be hard to please. Several of the interviewers were pleasant people, but the consistent theme that I continued to hear from all ten interviewers were "We work REALLY REALLY hard here and we are always challenged, and Amazon expects the best." I did not once here that they LOVE their jobs, nor that they thought the culture was friendly or uplifting. From years at Google, the culture there was all about Googlieness - something Amazon folks looked very confused about when I mentioned having a positive personality at work and not tolerating passive aggressive behavior in the workplace. I can see now that it was a blessing I did not accept an offer because it would have been a pool of sharks trying to prove who has more power. The company culture as I was told has a lot of morale issues, and they quote "are losing great talent all the time" to other companies like Google and Microsoft. Don't get me wrong, I am sure there are people that are happy at Amazon and feel challenged in a positive way, but I think a lot of the people work twice as hard for half of the pay, praise, and rewarding career they probably thought they were going to have working for Amazon. They clearly need to clean house when it comes to several Executive Assistant and inject the space with more positive personalities. It was evident that the executive assistants tend to push the VP's around, which I found very surprising. Shouldn't it be the other way around? They will continue to scare off talent unless they adopt values that make employees feel valued, praised, and rewarded for challenging hard work. I probably would have had an ulcer by the end of the year.