Ethan Evans on getting promoted, from someone who did the promoting
Most career advice online is written by people who have never sat on the other side of the table. Ethan Evans has, for about fifteen years.
He was a Vice President at Amazon until he retired in 2020, working on Prime Video, the Amazon Appstore, Merch by Amazon, Prime Gaming and Twitch Commerce, and running global teams of several hundred people. By his own count he reviewed over 10,000 resumes and conducted more than 2,500 interviews. He now publishes career advice, mostly free, on YouTube, LinkedIn and his Substack.
I have learned a great deal from it, and none of it is the usual material.
Why this one is different
The gap in most advice is that it describes what candidates should do without explaining what the decision-maker is weighing. Evans works from the other direction. He explains what a promotion committee argues about, why a strong performer stalls at senior manager, what an executive actually reads in a hiring packet, and how the politics of a large organisation function — not as a complaint, but as a system with rules you can learn.
That perspective is rare because the people who have it are usually still employed and cannot say any of it out loud.
A few of the themes that hold up across his work:
- Promotion is a decision made by other people. Doing excellent work is necessary and nowhere near sufficient; the deciding room needs evidence, and someone in it has to be able to argue your case.
- The jump from senior individual contributor or manager to executive is a change in kind, not degree. The thing that got you here is not the thing that gets you up.
- Scope beats effort. Working harder on a small problem loses to working sensibly on a large one.
- Relationships are load-bearing, and building them is a skill rather than a personality trait.
Where to start
The channel is at youtube.com/@EthanEvansVP. Start anywhere — the material is not sequential — but the videos on getting unstuck, on how corporate politics actually work, and on the senior-manager-to-executive jump are the ones that reframe things fastest.
He also runs paid classes and coaching through ethanevans.com. This is not an affiliate link and we get nothing from it; the free content alone is worth the subscribe.
Why it is on this site
Hired exists because the software on the other side of an application keeps a record on you and you cannot see it. Evans covers the human half of that same asymmetry: the judgment being made about you in rooms you are not in, and what evidence reaches those rooms.
Both halves point at the same practical conclusion. You cannot influence a decision you have no record for. Whether it is a hiring manager searching an applicant tracking system or a promotion committee reading a packet, someone is arguing about you from a document, and the document is only as good as what you wrote down at the time.
That is the whole argument for keeping your own record, and he makes the human version of it better than we do.
Keep reading
- What an applicant tracking system actually does with your resumeAn ATS stores and searches candidates. It very rarely auto-rejects on keywords, and the 75% figure everyone quotes has no source. Here is what the software really does, and the one place it genuinely loses people.
- STAR is an interview framework. It does not fit a resume bulletSituation, Task, Action, Result works when you have ninety seconds to speak. A resume bullet gives you about fourteen words. Here is what survives the compression, with before-and-after examples.