Inside that is called raising the bar. Often times I would personally aim to find people who were 50% better than the best person I knew in that role. Often times I would still incline on people during their POD. I would just strongly incline with 'raises the bar' on folks who met that rare exception. Honestly I was on the Dave Clark side of the business and we were much more chill about things vs the Jassy/AWS cult. Those dudes might as well be from the moon. So take my statement with a grain of salt. We worked for the same company... but we also didn't, Amazon is just that big.

I had plenty of times where an entire hiring pod would incline on a candidate because they had the soft skills we were looking for in that role and we knew we could sharpen their technical skillset in house. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to work at a FAANG... you just have to be interviewed by a team that is hungry and likes you.