Amazon To Hire 55,000 People For Corporate, Tech Roles

Amazon is preparing another massive hiring spree, but this time it is not warehouse workers but rather corporate roles.

New chief executive Andy Jassy told Reuters that Amazon is planning to hire 55,000 people for corporate and technology roles globally in the coming months.

This is on top of previous hiring sprees. In March 2020, Amazon had announced that it would hire 100,000 warehouse and delivery workers in the US, to cope with demand during the Coronavirus pandemic.

Amazon hiring

But during 2020 it actually hired more than 500,000 people to fulfill warehouse and delivery roles.

Then in May this year Amazon said it was creating 10,000 new corporate and operations jobs in the UK, and investing £10 million over three years to train up to 5,000 employees in new skills.

In the United States, Amazon in the second largest employer in America (behind Walmart), and the addition of an extra 55,000 jobs at Amazon is nearly equal to Facebook’s total workforce (Facebook had 60,654 staff as of March this year).

Jassy revealed the new jobs that will be located around the world, in his first press interview since he took over Amazon’s CEO position in July from Jeff Bezos.

Jassy told Reuters that Amazon needed more firepower to keep up with demand in retail, the cloud and advertising, among other businesses.

He said the company’s new bet to launch satellites into orbit to widen broadband access, called Project Kuiper, would require a lot of new hires, too.

In July this year Amazon paid Facebook an undisclosed sum of money to acquire the social networking giant’s satellite Internet team of specialists.

Global job openings

Reuters reported that Amazon’s annual job fair scheduled to begin 15 September, and Jassy hopes now is a good time for recruiting.

“There are so many jobs during the pandemic that have been displaced or have been altered, and there are so many people who are thinking about different and new jobs,” said Jassy, who cited a US survey from PwC that 65 percent of workers wanted a new role.

“It’s part of what we think makes ‘Career Day’ so timely and so useful,” he reportedly said.

The new hires would represent a 20 percent increase in Amazon’s tech and corporate staff, who currently number around 275,000 globally, the company said.

Of the more than 55,000 jobs Jassy announced, over 40,000 will be in the United States, while others will be in countries such as India, Germany and Japan.