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DPA
Seattle
At one point last week, Amazon had about 37,200 job listings around the world.
That’s the most listings the Seattle company has posted on its Amazon.jobs career site in at least 15 months, a company spokesperson said - and may be the most ever, though a system update prevents easy comparisons to earlier periods.
Amazon is seeking all kind of employees — from hourly warehouse workers to top-paid machine-learning experts, underscoring the breadth and scope of the company’s operations and ambition. The listings provide a rough map of Amazon’s near-term growth priorities across businesses and geographies.
Amazon’s ongoing hiring follows a year when its global workforce grew by 150,500 people, or more than 23 percent. It finished 2019 with 798,000 full- and part-time employees, not including contractors.
In the United States, where the company has more than 500,000 employees, continued hiring comes against a national backdrop of strong demand for labour. Nationwide, open positions outnumber job seekers, but openings fell to a still-strong 6.4 million at the end of 2019, down nearly 15 per cent from a year earlier and the second consecutive month of declines, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Amazon’s labour needs, particularly for in-demand technology professionals, can boggle the mind. The company had more than 10,600 jobs listings in software development, the largest single category, with an additional 7,400 listings in adjacent roles such as information technology engineering and data science.
Job listings are added, updated and filled on a minute-by-minute basis. The job listings in this story reflect openings at 2:03 pm (2203 GMT) on February 11, to be precise. By 2:42 pm, the number of listings had increased by 54.) Amazon was seeking to fill more than 4,500 project- or programme-management roles. It had nearly 2,050 openings in sales, advertising and account management. There were nearly 1,800 listings in fulfillment and operations management. More than 1,600 jobs were listed in human resources, including for recruiters whose job would be recruiting more recruiters.
“I don’t think most people, even people who have worked at a large, behemoth corporation like I did at AT&T, can even fathom the idea of having that many open professional positions at one time,” said Brent Heslop, who now heads the business-transformation practice in the Seattle office of consulting firm Mercer.
Amazon’s main headquarters city, where it already has more than 50,000 employees, remains the location of the plurality of job listings, and by a large margin. There were nearly 11,500 openings listed in Seattle.
The number 2 city was Bangalore, India, with 1,430 job listings at the time of the February 11 snapshot. Vancouver, British Columbia, had 973 listings, followed by London (906). Arlington, Virginia, where Amazon is building its second headquarters, had 517 openings, while nearby Herndon, Virginia, had 898. New York City, the abandoned HQ2 locale, is still a growing Amazon hub. It had 864 job listings.
Bellevue, Washington, where Amazon intends to grow to 15,000 employees in the next few years, had more than 700 openings.
The unemployment rate in King County was 2.1 per cent in December, not adjusting for seasonal trends. That’s the lowest level measured going back to 1990, when the Washington Employment Security Department began tracking local area unemployment the way it does now, said Anneliese Vance-Sherman, regional labor economist with the state agency.
An unemployment rate that low can be challenging for many businesses, which may struggle to attract or retain as many workers as they need.
“Workers have choices,” she said. “There’s a lot of demand from other businesses.” But it’s a tale of two job markets in the Seattle area. For technology giants such as Amazon and Microsoft, and their Silicon Valley-based competitors with large and growing offices in the region, the low local unemployment rate is less of a concern.
“Scale matters,” Vance-Sherman said. “They are able to draw from Boston, New York, San Francisco, Mumbai, Beijing. They aren’t as constrained in a manner of speaking because they’re not exclusively drawing from the local labour market.” Heslop said the brand cachet and competitive compensation offered by major technology employers help them find applicants, even in a tight labor market.
“My assumption is that Amazon doesn’t have to work as hard to source or attract candidates as the rest of us do,” he said.
Pay at Amazon starts at a minimum of 15 dollars an hour, the wage floor it instituted for US workers in 2018, and goes up to 160,000 dollars a year for even very senior employees with only a few exceptions, though stock awards boost total compensation far higher.
Median pay in the United States during 2018 was about 35,100 dollars, the company reported in its most recent proxy statement.
Seattle
At one point last week, Amazon had about 37,200 job listings around the world.
That’s the most listings the Seattle company has posted on its Amazon.jobs career site in at least 15 months, a company spokesperson said - and may be the most ever, though a system update prevents easy comparisons to earlier periods.
Amazon is seeking all kind of employees — from hourly warehouse workers to top-paid machine-learning experts, underscoring the breadth and scope of the company’s operations and ambition. The listings provide a rough map of Amazon’s near-term growth priorities across businesses and geographies.
Amazon’s ongoing hiring follows a year when its global workforce grew by 150,500 people, or more than 23 percent. It finished 2019 with 798,000 full- and part-time employees, not including contractors.
In the United States, where the company has more than 500,000 employees, continued hiring comes against a national backdrop of strong demand for labour. Nationwide, open positions outnumber job seekers, but openings fell to a still-strong 6.4 million at the end of 2019, down nearly 15 per cent from a year earlier and the second consecutive month of declines, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Amazon’s labour needs, particularly for in-demand technology professionals, can boggle the mind. The company had more than 10,600 jobs listings in software development, the largest single category, with an additional 7,400 listings in adjacent roles such as information technology engineering and data science.
Job listings are added, updated and filled on a minute-by-minute basis. The job listings in this story reflect openings at 2:03 pm (2203 GMT) on February 11, to be precise. By 2:42 pm, the number of listings had increased by 54.) Amazon was seeking to fill more than 4,500 project- or programme-management roles. It had nearly 2,050 openings in sales, advertising and account management. There were nearly 1,800 listings in fulfillment and operations management. More than 1,600 jobs were listed in human resources, including for recruiters whose job would be recruiting more recruiters.
“I don’t think most people, even people who have worked at a large, behemoth corporation like I did at AT&T, can even fathom the idea of having that many open professional positions at one time,” said Brent Heslop, who now heads the business-transformation practice in the Seattle office of consulting firm Mercer.
Amazon’s main headquarters city, where it already has more than 50,000 employees, remains the location of the plurality of job listings, and by a large margin. There were nearly 11,500 openings listed in Seattle.
The number 2 city was Bangalore, India, with 1,430 job listings at the time of the February 11 snapshot. Vancouver, British Columbia, had 973 listings, followed by London (906). Arlington, Virginia, where Amazon is building its second headquarters, had 517 openings, while nearby Herndon, Virginia, had 898. New York City, the abandoned HQ2 locale, is still a growing Amazon hub. It had 864 job listings.
Bellevue, Washington, where Amazon intends to grow to 15,000 employees in the next few years, had more than 700 openings.
The unemployment rate in King County was 2.1 per cent in December, not adjusting for seasonal trends. That’s the lowest level measured going back to 1990, when the Washington Employment Security Department began tracking local area unemployment the way it does now, said Anneliese Vance-Sherman, regional labor economist with the state agency.
An unemployment rate that low can be challenging for many businesses, which may struggle to attract or retain as many workers as they need.
“Workers have choices,” she said. “There’s a lot of demand from other businesses.” But it’s a tale of two job markets in the Seattle area. For technology giants such as Amazon and Microsoft, and their Silicon Valley-based competitors with large and growing offices in the region, the low local unemployment rate is less of a concern.
“Scale matters,” Vance-Sherman said. “They are able to draw from Boston, New York, San Francisco, Mumbai, Beijing. They aren’t as constrained in a manner of speaking because they’re not exclusively drawing from the local labour market.” Heslop said the brand cachet and competitive compensation offered by major technology employers help them find applicants, even in a tight labor market.
“My assumption is that Amazon doesn’t have to work as hard to source or attract candidates as the rest of us do,” he said.
Pay at Amazon starts at a minimum of 15 dollars an hour, the wage floor it instituted for US workers in 2018, and goes up to 160,000 dollars a year for even very senior employees with only a few exceptions, though stock awards boost total compensation far higher.
Median pay in the United States during 2018 was about 35,100 dollars, the company reported in its most recent proxy statement.
