According to Insider reports, Amazon team of the Web Services Department (AWS) had posted 24,988 open positions, but only 7,798 of those positions were approved to be filled.
The company posted over three times the number of job openings approved in 2022. This indicates Amazon’s over-hiring employees and the error has ever caused mass layoffs within the organization.
This has raised questions regarding hiring practices as the company conducted its largest layoffs in history in January 2023.
A former recruiting manager told Insider that Amazon’s job postings were meant to be “actively” filled as the company aimed to expand during a booming economy.
However, Due to the lack of oversight, there were “over-hiring issues” and leaders at the company would “squeeze people in where they could.”
Amazon has recently announced the second round of layoffs. The company sacked 27,000 employees in the last three months. Recently, the company announced the layoff of 9000 employees.
CEO Andy Jassy said, “Someone may ask why we didn’t announce these 9,000 role reductions with the ones we announced a couple of months ago.”
“The short answer is that not all of the teams were done with their analyses in the late fall; and rather than rush through these assessments without the appropriate diligence, we chose to share these decisions as we’ve made them so people had the information as soon as possible,” Andy Jassy added.
“Given the uncertain economy in which we reside, and the uncertainty that exists in the near future, we have chosen to be more streamlined in our costs and headcount,” he added.
“As our internal businesses evaluated what customers most care about, they made re-prioritization decisions that sometimes led to role reductions, sometimes led to moving people from one initiative to another, and sometimes led to new openings where we don’t have the right skills match from our existing team members”, he said.
He further added, “This initially led us to eliminate 18,000 positions (which we shared in January); and, as we completed the second phase of our planning this month, it led us to these additional 9,000 role reductions (though you will see limited hiring in some of our businesses in strategic areas where we’ve prioritized allocating more resources).”
