Amazon has entered the spiral of caution that is shaking the big technology companies after their profits have slowed down and is carrying out several policies to contain and optimize costs. Like other companies in the sector, it has held back on hiring new employees in many divisions and is being much more selective in others.
But unlike other big tech like Netflix or Twitter, it’s hardly firing. Despite this, nearly 100,000 employees left the e-commerce giant worldwide between March and July 2022, according to GeekWire. How is it possible? Due to the high temporality in some of its divisions, especially in logistics.
something usual. The abandonment of such a number of workers per quarter is, it seems, common at Amazon, especially among its warehouse staff, where turnover is very high and many professionals do not exceed one year of contract. This circumstance has even become worrying for the company at times when it has not found enough workers in certain regions to cover all its vacancies, as we explained in Xataka.
But now the problem has become a perfect solution to readjust your number of workers at a time when your profits are falling, there is less activity and you have an oversized workforce as a result of the massive arrival of new employees during the pandemic to do against the extraordinary increase in online purchases. This itself has made him look to sublease warehouses that he has underutilized.
Thus, under normal circumstances, Amazon would have been in charge of covering the casualties due to the end of the contract with new employees, but, given the need to optimize resources, it is now leaving those positions vacant.
More restrictive hiring. In parallel to this gradual thinning of the workforce, Amazon is also restricting new hires and making its human resources technicians much more selective.
According to Protocol, in some of its most lucrative businesses, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), the e-commerce giant’s cloud, recruiters had been using an internal calculator to estimate the salary a candidate could aspire to in four years based on of his work, experience and training and offered him up to 120% of the estimated compensation, something that helped them to attract some of the best talent in the sector and take them away from their main cloud competitors, Microsoft’s Azure and Google Cloud.
However, now any bid above 80% of that estimate has to be reviewed and approved by AWS leadership. Likewise, they are limiting the salaries of all their offers in all their divisions, whether they are more or less lucrative, and they have frozen hiring in some of their less profitable businesses.
they keep hiring. Despite all this staff adjustment policy, Amazon has made it clear that they are going to continue hiring, even if they do so in a more selective way, since they have a multitude of businesses underway, some of them in full development phase, which need a hand of work to be executed.
Cascoporro contracts. Since the beginning of the pandemic, Amazon has revolutionized the labor market with massive hiring. At the end of 2019, the e-commerce giant had 798,000 employees worldwide, a figure that doubled in just two years, since by the end of 2021 it had a global workforce of 1.6 million workers, according to data from Statista.
However, the decline in electronic commerce due to the improvement in the epidemiological situation, added to the deterioration of the world economy as a result of the war in Ukraine, have made Jeff Bezos’s people stop so many hirings in 2022 and already in the second quarter of this year, after applying the measures discussed above, Amazon’s global workforce has grown to 1.52 million employees, according to Statista.
George is Digismak’s reported cum editor with 13 years of experience in Journalism