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Bar raiser interviewing

Skill Amey-Thakur/AI-SKILLS/skills/big-tech-processes/bar-raiser-interviewing

Interview as an Amazon-style bar raiser who holds an independent veto and judges each candidate against the long-term hiring bar. Use when you sit on an interview loop as the neutral interviewer accountable for the bar, not for filling the team's open seat.From its SKILL.md

Install
npx -y skills add Amey-Thakur/AI-SKILLS --skill bar-raiser-interviewing

Assembled from the repository path, not quoted from the project. Check it against their README if it does not work.

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SKILL.md

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Bar raiser interviewing

A bar raiser is an interviewer with no stake in filling the seat and one job: protect the company's long-term hiring bar against the hiring manager's short-term need. The role exists because a team under headcount pressure will rationalize a weak yes, and the person best placed to catch that is someone the vacancy does not hurt. Strip out the independent veto and every loop drifts toward the median of whoever happened to be available.

Method

  1. Confirm your independence before the loop starts. You are not on the hiring team, you carry none of its headcount pressure, and you own the bar across future hires, not this quarter's gap. If the hiring manager can overrule you, you are a reviewer, not a bar raiser.
  2. Assign competencies across the loop so nothing is tested twice or not at all. Map each interviewer to two or three Leadership Principles or role competencies, split behavioral coverage, and remove overlap. A loop where three people probe the same strength has three blind spots.
  3. Collect written feedback independently before the debrief. Each interviewer submits Inclined or Not Inclined with evidence before hearing anyone else. Feedback written after the room talks is anchored feedback, and groupthink launders a weak candidate into a hire.
  4. Demand evidence, not impressions. Push interviewers to STAR structure: Situation, Task, Action, Result, and separate the candidate's "I" from the team's "we". "Strong presence" is a vibe; "reduced p99 latency 40% by rewriting the cache path" is a signal.
  5. Apply the raises-the-bar test explicitly. The question is not "would I work with them" but "is this person better than half of current employees at this level in this role". A hire who lowers the median is a no even when the team is desperate.
  6. Run the debrief to surface dissent, not bury it. Ask the lowest-confidence interviewer first, make each vote defend its evidence, and block the hiring manager's urgency or the loudest voice from carrying the room. Consensus reached by fatigue is not consensus.
  7. Exercise the veto when the bar is not met, and write down why. An independent no, recorded with its reasoning, is a legitimate and durable outcome. Reopening the search costs weeks; a mis-hire costs the team for years.

Litmus tests

  • Could you defend the decision to someone who joins the company in two years and reads only the written feedback?
  • Did any yes rest on team fit or urgency rather than evidence of the competency?
  • Would this candidate raise the median of the current team at this level?

Boundaries

The bar raiser judges the hire against the long-term bar, not sourcing diversity, comp negotiation, or the hiring manager's read on day-to-day team fit. This is an Amazon-shaped ritual: adapt the veto and the leveling rubric to your org's convention, and never let it stand in for reference checks or the manager's own call on scope.

What ships with it

Read from the repository

Just SKILL.md. No reference files, no scripts.

Gives 0 of the 12 instructions most hr recruiting skills give in 695 tokens

Counted across 356 of the 357 authors here whose files we hold, read 2026-08-07

  • Quantify achievements with specific metricsin 14 of 356, across 6 files
  • Keep the resume under two pagesin 14 of 356, across 6 files
  • Request the full job description if not providedin 12 of 356, across 4 files
  • Extract keywords and prioritize job requirementsin 12 of 356, across 4 files
  • Stop and ask for clarification if required inputs are missingin 12 of 356, across 5 files
  • Map candidate experience to job requirementsin 11 of 356, across 3 files
  • Ask if the user wants adjustmentsin 11 of 356, across 3 files
  • Provide strengths and gap analysis after the resumein 10 of 356, across 2 files
  • Request candidate background details if not providedin 10 of 356, across 2 files
  • Format experience bullets as action verb plus resultin 10 of 356, across 2 files
  • Ask for missing inputs before startingin 10 of 356, across 9 files
  • Use exact job description terminologyin 9 of 356, across 1 file

Said here and by no other author read

  • confirm independence before the loop starts
  • collect written feedback before the debrief
  • require STAR evidence from interviewers
  • apply the raises-the-bar test
  • ask the lowest-confidence interviewer first
  • veto unqualified candidates in writing

Grouped from the skills themselves: near-identical wordings counted once, and counted by distinct author, so one author publishing three of these counts once. Length counted with cl100k_base; the agent that loads this file may tokenize it differently.

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