“During our hiring meetings, we ask people to consider three questions before making a decision: Will you admire this person?… Will this person raise the average level of effectiveness of the group they're entering?… Along what dimension might this person be a superstar?”
Raise the Average
From Jeff Bezos’s 1998 Letter to Shareholders (Amazon, 1999), in the “Work Hard, Have Fun, Make History” section.
The middle question is the operational one. The other two test the candidate in isolation: would you admire them, do they have a superstar dimension. A team’s average hire can pass both. Only raise-the-average forces a comparison against the team’s existing median, which is why it has bite. It implicitly fails the candidate who is as good as the team, the failure mode Bezos names: “We want to fight entropy. The bar has to continuously go up.”
Amazon later formalized the principle in the Bar Raiser program, in which a trained interviewer from outside the hiring team holds a veto on candidates who would not raise the average for their level. The 1998 letter is the principle; the Bar Raiser role is what enforcement looks like once raise-the-average stops being a manager’s intention and starts being a process gate someone is paid to defend.