Odds not in your favor

Most Amazon managers who are constantly hiring are just trying to find bodies to grind and use up. They're not looking to "hire the best".

The most broken teams with "priority needs" are always first in line for general non-referral recruiting. Priority is usually given to these teams because they are severely understaffed. Why are they understaffed? Poor retention. Why does everyone leave these teams so quickly? It's almost always a really bad manager trying to hold together a broken system which generates pager alerts every single night when you are on-call, so there's no sleep for you. This will never improve. Why? Because Amazon's culture makes it very difficult to pay off long-standing technical debt. Instead, these teams constantly have to heroically handle these out-of-control situations without any reward for their efforts other than being shown the door if they ever express frustration with the insanity. Once any team has a new manager (which nearly every Amazon team has every year) who ends up being incompetent but able to survive politically, they're usually doomed for a few years of churning and burning through new staff until that until they finally fire that manager or he convinces someone in senior leadership to fund a complete rewrite of the system (which is almost always done by a separate team and then the original team still gets canned).

You might be one of the very few lucky ones who gets randomly assigned to a great team, but the odds aren't in your favor. For example, my team rarely has actual openings because we have low turnover, easy hours, and great cutting edge projects launching phenomenal new services. Once I found out the truth, it was easy to ignore the huge amount of internal recruiting going on with these terrible managers promising promotions which will never happen and everything including the kitchen sink to get people in the door to their teams.

It's too bad Amazon HR and senior leadership keeps letting these bad managers abuse so many good people instead of recognizing they are the real problem as they just manage to stay afloat at the expense of so many good people.