Amazon is looking to fill 40,000 corporate and tech jobs across more than 220 locations in the United States, the company announced Wednesday, as CEO Andy Jassy said the tech giant “continues to grow quickly and relentlessly invent across many areas.”
The desire to hire a total of 55,000 more corporate and tech employees globally represents a 20% increase in that segment, which numbers around 275,000 globally right now.
Amazon previously revealed that total employment reached a new high of 1.335 million worldwide full- and part-time employees as of the end of June, up 64,000 from the end of March. The company said Wednesday it also wants to fill tens of thousands of hourly positions in its operations network.
Amazon is sharing the figures as it promotes its upcoming Career Day, which will be held virtually on Sept. 15 and serves as a recruiting and training event for current and prospective employees.
Jassy, who took over as CEO from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos on July 5, told Reuters that the company needed more firepower to keep up with demand in retail, cloud computing, and advertising, among other businesses. He also told the news agency that the broadband satellite effort Project Kuiper will also require a lot of new hires.
“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,” Jassy said.
Amazon said it has hired over 450,000 people in the U.S. since the beginning of the pandemic. Its Career Day in 2020 attracted the highest one-week number of job applications in the history of the company.
The event will feature more than 20,000 personalized career-coaching sessions with a team of 1,200 Amazon recruiters. Coding workshops led by Amazon software development engineers and a “How to Interview at Amazon” breakout session led by two senior recruiters are among the Career Day highlights.
Amazon announced in April that it planned to invest more than $1 billion in wage increases for its operations workers, promising raises of between 50 cents and $3 an hour to more than 500,000 employees.
In his final letter to shareholders in April, Bezos wrote, “Despite what we’ve accomplished, it’s clear to me that we need a better vision for our employees’ success.” He promised that Amazon will be “Earth’s Best Employer and Earth’s Safest Place to Work” in addition to its longstanding claim as “Earth’s Most Customer-Centric Company.”
Where all of the new corporate and tech employees actually work remains to be seen. Earlier this year, Amazon touted its desire to “return to an office-centric culture,” but has shifted that timeline in the months since as competitors moved to offer more hybrid work models and COVID-19 surged around the country. Amazon has now set Jan. 3 as a possible return date.
