Every few days, it seems, a new Amazon announcement heralds the creation of 1,000 jobs here or 2,000 jobs there — or the quest to put 50,000 jobs somewhere — as the tech giant hires more and more people for more and more tasks.
A new report from Yahoo! Finance puts the numbers in interesting context when it comes to the job-creating power of the Seattle-based company and the rest of the United States as a whole.
Yahoo says that as of June, Amazon employed 382,400, up from 268,900 the year before, according to its quarterly financial reports. That translates into roughly 113,500 net new hires in the past 12 months.
In terms of job creation, if Amazon was a state, those figures would put the company behind only Texas, California, Florida, and New York over that period of time, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Yahoo also points out that it’s not all job creation when it comes to Amazon, especially if you assign its e-commerce dominance some of the blame for the fact that traditional retail is suffering. Department stores, for instance, lost nearly 30,000 jobs last year, according the BLS.
Amazon said during its quarterly earnings call at the end of July that the company’s base of software developers and engineers, as well as its salesforce — particularly in Amazon Web Services and advertising — grew at a faster rate than the overall company growth.
“Most of the growth, especially in the last year, has been in in software development engineering jobs and sales roles, in addition to fulfillment operations talent,” CFO Brian Olsavsky said.
And Amazon is certainly not slowing down. Its jobs site currently lists more than 16,000 open positions
