Sooraj Kumar
- Sooraj Kumar landed an analyst role at Amazon without a referral after a yearlong job search.He shared how he responded to a rescinded job offer and what Amazon's "loop" interviews were like.He said he doesn't think referrals help candidates as much as they used to.
By the time Sooraj Kumar landed an interview at Amazon, he'd already sat through more than two dozen interviews during his yearlong job search. While none resulted in an offer, he said those experiences helped prepare him for the tech giant's notoriously challenging "loop" interview process.
Kumar's job search journey began in January 2022, when he moved to the US from Pakistan to pursue a master's degree in business analytics at DePaul University. He started looking for full-time employment in November 2022, but said the job market was challenging, in part because he wasn't yet authorized to work in the US — and some employers didn't want to wait for his work authorization to be processed or commit to sponsoring a visa in the future.
In June 2023, Kumar graduated from DePaul and began interviewing for a business analyst position at an investment firm. After four interviews, he said he received a verbal offer in August, pending a background check. That's when things went awry.
Based on his research and conversations with friends who'd gone through the process, Kumar said he expected the background check to take no more than 15 days — but day 20 passed, then day 25, with no update. The company doing the background check told him the delay was tied to his lack of prior work experience in the US, which complicated the process.
In September 2023, around the 25-day mark, Kumar said the company told him that, due to business needs, they couldn't wait any longer for his background check to come through. His offer had been rescinded.
Kumar's background check cleared after about 35 days. He reached out to the company to share the update — but by then, it was too late.
"That last-minute decision from the company shocked me," said the 28-year-old, who lives in the Seattle area.
Kumar is among the tech professionals who have struggled to find work in recent years. Since the start of 2025, global tech companies — including Microsoft, Google, and Amazon — have collectively laid off more than 80,000 employees, according to Layoffs.fyi. Tech job postings on Indeed as of July were 36% below early-2002 levels.
This hiring slowdown has particularly affected recent college graduates trying to enter the workforce. That includes the nearly 200,000 foreign students who received F-1 Optional Practical Training (OPT) work authorization last year — and whose visa status depends on staying employed.
Bouncing back from a rescinded job offer
While waiting for his background check to clear, Kumar started an unpaid business analyst internship to pause the 90-day unemployment clock allowed under his OPT visa — helping him keep his visa status in good standing.
But the bad news was that he still didn't have a full-time, paying job — and he'd lost momentum in his search. Kumar said he'd been applying to around 20 jobs a day for months, but paused once he received the verbal offer.
After taking a couple of weeks to process what happened and plan his next steps, Kumar said he started waking up at 6 a.m. — a couple of hours before his internship began — to apply for jobs. He'd then apply for a few more hours after work, aiming to submit 50 applications a day.
"I refocused, got even more serious about my search, and put in extra effort," he said.
One of the roles he applied for that September was a business analyst position at Amazon. He submitted the application through the company's website, without a referral. Kumar said he barely even remembered applying for the role when, in November, Amazon reached out to schedule an interview.
How he prepared for Amazon's loop interview day
After a one-hour phone interview with someone from the hiring team, Kumar was invited to Amazon's "loop," a daylong series of interviews — in his case, five, all of which were conducted virtually. Aside from a 30-minute lunch break, he said the interviews were separated by only about five minutes.
Kumar's loop included three interviews in the morning, from roughly 9 a.m. to noon, followed by a lunch break and then two more interviews in the afternoon. He said he spoke with members of the hiring team, people from teams he'd collaborate with, and one person from HR. Around Christmas of 2023, Kumar said he received and accepted an offer from Amazon, which came with a six-figure compensation package.
Sooraj Kumar
Looking back on the interview process, Kumar said it was important to be familiar with Amazon's leadership principles — including "customer obsession," "ownership," and "invent and simplify" — and to prepare professional stories that align with these values.
He said that one effective, Amazon-approved way to discuss past work experiences during interviews is the STAR method: situation, task, action, and result. The format helped him clearly explain his impact, and he believes it also made it easier for interviewers to take notes and remember his responses.
While his yearlong job search was grueling, Kumar believes the experience he gained interviewing for other roles helped him excel in Amazon's process.
"If I didn't have all the previous interview experience, I might have never ended up at Amazon," he said."
Top job-search takeaways
In addition to the value of interview preparation, Kumar said he had two other takeaways from his job search. First, while the quality of an application matters, he felt that volume was just as important — if not more so. No matter how strong his application was, he said the odds often felt stacked against him, so his best strategy was to give himself as many chances as possible.
His second takeaway: Referrals weren't particularly effective. He said most of the interviews he landed came from cold applications, while the ones he submitted with referrals typically went nowhere.
Kumar suspects referrals have become too common at large companies, adding that his own LinkedIn inbox started filling up with people asking him for one after he joined Amazon. Unless the person referring you is on the hiring team or closely connected to it, he said, he wouldn't count on a referral having much impact.
"Referrals are very mainstream now," he said. "I don't think that many referrals carry much weight."
