Amazon curbs corporate retail hiring for the rest of 2022

Image: The Verge

According to a report by Karen Weise of The New York Times, Amazon is freezing corporate hiring for its retail business for the remainder of 2022 in an effort to hedge its bets against a rough economic forecast.

The hiring freeze includes all corporate and technology positions for Amazon’s retail and operations, which account for the bulk of Amazon sales. However, Amazon’s more profitable cloud computing division won’t be affected. Student hiring and field positions are also exempt from the pause, and Bloomberg notes the warehouse network will not be affected, either.

The announcement comes from an internal memo sent to Amazon recruiters, who were instructed to tell potential candidates that Amazon was not in a hiring freeze and that any open positions would be closed soon. The announcement also mentioned that new openings would become available after the new year.

Any candidates that had interviews scheduled before October 15th are still eligible to receive offers but would have their start dates pushed back to 2023. The Times notes there were around 20,000 openings listed in the division that Amazon was looking to fill before the freeze went into effect.

“Amazon continues to have a significant number of open roles available across the company,” according to Amazon spokesman Brad Glasser. “We have many different businesses at various stages of evolution, and we expect to keep adjusting our hiring strategies in each of these businesses at various junctures.”

The writing on the wall may have come back in September when Amazon chose not to hold its annual “career day,” where it typically recruits for around 10,000 positions to join its workforce of over 1.5 million global employees.

Amazon joins Meta as one of the latest tech companies to slow its hiring practices in an effort to cut costs. The hiring freeze is another measure put together by Amazon’s chief executive Andy Jassy in a response to Amazon’s slowest growth in over 20 years. Jassy has also curtailed spending by pumping the brakes on Amazon’s rapid warehouse expansion and closing other facilities.