At Amazon, I have been working as a recruiter for Software Development Engineers. We have a tedious task whenever we build a list of candidates to reach out to - we have to manually merge any duplicate candidate profiles our CRM software Beamery detects. As a new hire, much of my time was spent checking for duplicates, or ‘dupe checking’ on behalf of more senior colleagues.

Since I cannot share the document publicly, I have written this entry to explain my process and what I’ve learned.

The Problem

There was no comprehensive dupe checking manual before I joined the team. There were some trainings, but they did not cover all the possible cases a dupe checker may encounter. My colleague had made a guide, but it did not cover every step in the process. Dupe checking involves verifying a candidate’s information across multiple systems, merging profiles when duplicates are encountered, and changing a candidate’s status in Beamery.

There are many possible places a dupe checker can get confused or make an error. There are two main systems to track candidate profiles, Amazon Hire and Beamery. The systems could sometimes behave in unexpected ways. Some candidates who had common names were difficult to dupe check because of how many possibilities came up.

Audience

The guide I created was aimed at our incoming hires. Our team has a newly created Dupe Checker role for inexperienced recruiters as a way to gain more experience with Amazon recruiting systems. Because this role was so new, there was little existing documentation for it.

This audience needs:

• A breakdown of what each system does and what it’s used for
• Clear instructions on what they will need to do when faced with various problems

Creating the Guide

My first step was to break the task into steps. The first step is to check if the candidate is already in our job portal, Amazon Hire, and to check if there were dupe profiles there. Then the dupe checker needs to check our CRM software to ensure the candidate does not have dupe profiles and is not already engaged with another Amazon recruiter.

I realized that dupe checking boils down to a series of choices the checker makes when they encounter certain situations. If the candidate has dupes in Hire, merge them. If the candidate has dupes in Beamery, merge them. If there is no profile, create one.

I decided that a flowchart would be the best way to represent the choices involved in dupe checking because it can tell the reader exactly what choice they need to make when faced with a certain situation. Although I cannot share the real chart, I have included the chart below with the text removed.

Each box contains a yes-or-no question, which leads to the next question the dupe checker needs to ask, and finally ends with how the dupe checker should handle the outcome. This is accompanied by paragraphs to explain processes that need more detail. One of the outcomes in the bottom box asks the reader to refer to one of these sections.

Finally, I combined my guide with my colleague’s guide to create a complete guide of 7 pages. I wrote 4 of those pages.