Amazon.com Inc’s chief executive Andy Jassy told Reuters that the company plans to hire 55,000 individuals for corporate and technical roles worldwide in the coming months.
As of June 30, that amounted to more than a third of Google’s workforce and nearly all Facebook’s.
In his first press interview since becoming Amazon’s CEO in July, Jassy said the company needs additional firepower to keep up with demand in retail, cloud computing, and advertising, among other areas. Project Kuiper, the company’s latest bet on launching satellites into orbit to expand broadband access, he claimed, would also necessitate a large number of new workers.
With Amazon’s annual job fair starting on September 15, Jassy hopes for a solid recruiting season. “There have been so many occupations that have been displaced or altered as a result of the epidemic, and there are so many people who are thinking about different and new jobs,” Jassy added, citing a PwC survey that found 65 percent of workers wanted new employment.
He explained, “It part of what we think makes ‘Career Day’ so topical and important.” According to the company, the new hiring would represent a 20% increase in Amazon’s tech and corporate workforce, which now stands at roughly 275,000 people worldwide.
Amazon’s hiring frenzy is the company’s latest during a period of increased scrutiny of its labor standards and objections from the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. A failed attempt by some employees in Alabama to form a union earlier this year exposed Amazon’s grueling warehouse work and militant anti-union stance. Following the struggle, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, whom Jassy succeeded, stated that it needed a more excellent vision for its employees.
When asked how he would reform Amazon’s rigorous workplace culture, Jassy said its significant focus on consumers and ingenuity made it ripe for change.
“Everyone at the company has the freedom – and, more importantly, the expectation – to critically examine how it may be improved and then come up with new methods to improve it.”
According to the company, Amazon is advertising engineering, research science, and robotics jobs, which are mainly new to the company rather than those that have been eliminated.
Some businesses have struggled to fill vacancies and manage remote and in-person work in a recovering US economy and tightening the labor market. It’s unclear how many of the Amazon positions — such as competitive engineering hiring – have been open for a long time.
Amazon, which had previously claimed an “office-centric culture,” later scaled back its vision and, beginning next year, will allow employees to spend only three days a week in person at its headquarters.
Amazon, already the country’s second-largest private employer, plans to hire more than 500,000 people by 2020, primarily in warehouse and delivery operations. There has been a lot of movement in that area.
To keep up with increased demand from buyers who want things delivered to their homes, the corporation is investing substantially in creating more warehouses and raising wages to entice staff. Amazon has been “extremely competitive on the compensation side,” according to Jassy. “We’ve led the way with the $15 minimum wage,” he added, adding that “actually, the beginning salary is $17 an hour” in some areas.
Over 40,000 of the more than 55,000 jobs announced by Jassy will be in the United States, with the rest going to India, Germany, and Japan.
When it was looking for a location for its second headquarters in 2017, Amazon promised a big tech hiring spree. Officials from cities and states all around North America fawned over the corporation because of its jobs and tax revenue.
Arlington, Virginia, the winner of Amazon’s “HQ2” contest, now has only 2,800 job opportunities, which is a small fraction of the 25,000 jobs Amazon has promised it over the next decade. Another 2,000 people have been added to the city of Bellevue, which is located near Amazon’s hometown of Seattle.
The career expo will be held all around the world. Last year, Amazon saw 22,000 people tune in from India and other countries outside the United States, according to Jassy.
Via: Rappler