Amazon in Seattle is making a series of jobs cuts at the HQ, according to reports. Predominantly job cuts will be falling in the consumer retail divisions of the company but hiring in other places of Amazon continues apace. Amazon is still hiring around the world and continues to grow its headcount in general.
An Amazon spokesperson is reported as saying:
“As part of our annual planning process, we are making head count adjustments across the company — small reductions in a couple of places and aggressive hiring in many others. For affected employees, we work to find roles in the areas where we are hiring.”
There is little doubt that Amazon is expanding swiftly and hiring globally. After all, they wouldn’t be seeking a second North American HQ (HQ2) that will eventually host as many as 50,000 employees, if they weren’t looking to increase staff numbers to service the ever-growing business in the longer term. But, perhaps inevitably, as a company develops the focus of what its staff do changes over time. And that seems to be what’s happening here.
And some perspective on Amazon jobs is useful. Amazon continues to be in the market and is hiring plenty of new staff. Amazon’s global workforce stood at 566,000 in December 2017 and that’s up 66% year on year. Considering only corporate roles outside of Amazon’s warehouses, the company had 12,500 open jobs available for application globally this week. 3,900 are available in Seattle in Washington State alone. Hopefully everyone who finds their role is being made redundant will find a job elsewhere within the Amazon business, if they so wish.
And, don’t forget, that a total of 130,000 jobs were created by Amazon in 2017. And the news of Amazon in Seattle and jobs in the area came from the local newspaper and you can read their report here.
