Amazon Unplugged
Letting talent hear Amazon from
the people who shape it.
Employer brands often sound too managed.
Amazon Unplugged took a different route.
It gave candidates, employees, and talent audiences a closer view of Amazon through conversations between senior leaders. The format was hosted by Talent Acquisition Director Rajiv Sharma and featured senior Amazon leaders across people, HR, technology, payments, operations, and leadership functions.
The aim was clear: make Amazon’s employer brand feel more open, useful, and human. Not through slogans. Through answers.
The Outcome
The Context
Talent does not only want to know that a company is big.
It wants to know how people inside that company think.
Amazon Unplugged was created as a video-led employer brand property built around leadership conversations, workplace stories, and hiring transparency.
The series gave audiences access to senior voices and practical answers around what Amazon looks for in talent, how candidates are evaluated, and what people should prepare for when they want to build a career with Amazon.
The Challenge
Employer brand content can become too polished to be useful.
When every message sounds like a campaign, talent stops listening.
Amazon needed a format that could carry senior leadership thinking without feeling distant. The conversations had to feel structured, but not lifeless. They had to reveal useful truths without becoming a recruitment manual.
The strength of the series came from its format: two leaders in conversation, answering the questions candidates actually care about.
A video-led concept built to humanize the brand.
By mapping actual candidate questions directly to leaders, the format created a structured, transparent conversation that candidates valued.
What needed
to change
Amazon’s employer brand needed a more direct and human-facing content property.
The content had to move from saying "this is who we are" to showing how leaders think, what hiring teams value, and what candidates can expect.
The audience needed to feel closer to the organisation before applying, joining, or even considering Amazon seriously.
What Impulse
worked on
Impulse Digital oversaw the concept and execution of the Amazon Unplugged series. The work covered:
- Video podcast format development
- Episode planning & structuring
- Shoot execution & set design
- Edits across 6 episodes
- Structuring leadership conversations for social platforms
- Shaping the property as an employer brand content series
The series featured senior leaders including Luli, Vice President, HR, North American Operations, Deepti Verma, Vice President, People Experience and Technology, Amazon India, and Mahendra Nerurkar, Vice President, Payments for Emerging Markets.
Each conversation was built to make Amazon’s hiring expectations, leadership thinking, and workplace culture easier to understand.
The Signals
Candidates look for signals that job descriptions cannot communicate.
What changed
Amazon Unplugged created a content property that made the employer brand feel closer.
It gave Amazon a way to speak to talent through conversation instead of campaign language.
The numbers show strong audience response: 1.2M+ views, 9.5M+ impressions, and 10K+ engagement.
For an employer brand property, that matters because the content was not built around entertainment alone. It was built around trust, access, and clarity.
Conversations between senior leaders built around transparency.
The series features insights on career paths, interview prep, and leadership values directly from Amazon's top leadership.
Why this matters
for future clients
Talent is not only evaluating job descriptions. It is evaluating signals.
For companies competing for serious talent, this kind of content can do what polished employer claims cannot.
It makes the workplace feel real before the first interview. It builds trust through transparency and sets clear expectations for both sides.
A strong message distributed across global channels.
Optimized for both global and local audiences, the series reached over 9.5 million impressions through strategic digital distribution.
Letting talent hear Amazon
from the people who shape it.
Amazon Unplugged worked because it made essential leadership and culture signals easier to read. For companies competing for serious talent, this kind of content makes the workplace feel real before the first interview.
To leader conversation. To culture signal.
To trust and clarity.