The hiring freeze includes all of Amazon’s retail business and technology positions and operations, which make up the bulk of Amazon’s sales. However, Amazon’s more profitable cloud computing division will not be affected. Student recruitment and field positions are also exempt from the break, and Bloomberg notes the warehouse network is also unaffected.
The announcement comes from an internal memo sent to Amazon recruiters, who were instructed to tell potential candidates that Amazon was not on a hiring freeze and that all open positions would soon be closed. The announcement also mentioned that new openings would be available after the new year.
Candidates scheduled for interviews before October 15 will still be eligible for offers, but would push their start date back to 2023. Time notes that there were about 20,000 job openings in the division that Amazon wanted to fill before the freeze went into effect.
“Amazon still has a significant number of open positions within the company,” said Amazon spokesman Brad Glasser. “We have many different companies in different stages of evolution and we expect to continue to adjust our recruitment strategies in each of these companies at different times.”
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 about 10,000 positions to join its workforce of more than 1.5 million global employees.
Amazon joins Meta as one of the latest tech companies to slow down its recruiting practices in an effort to cut costs. The employee freeze is another measure put in place by Amazon CEO Andy Jassy in response to Amazon’s slowest growth in more than 20 years. Jassy has also curbed spending by curbing Amazon’s rapid warehouse expansion and closing other facilities.
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