Amazon is freezing hiring for corporate roles in its retail business, according to a report from The New York Times on Tuesday.
The Seattle tech giant is the latest to slow hiring plans amid the broader economic downturn and high inflation. Others including Google and Meta have also put the brakes on employee additions.
Amazon won’t freeze hiring for cloud computing roles, according to the NYT, which viewed a copy of an internal announcement.
Amazon makes a majority of its revenue from the retail business, though Amazon Web Services is more profitable.
We’ve reached out to Amazon for more details and will update the story when we hear back.
Update: A spokesperson for Amazon provided this statement: “Amazon continues to have a significant number of open roles available across the company. We have many different businesses at various stages of evolution, and we expect to keep adjusting our hiring strategies in each of these businesses at various junctures.”
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said earlier this year that the company was determined to get costs under control and return its consumer business to profitability, after doubling its fulfillment capacity and hiring hundreds of thousands of workers to meet demand during the pandemic.
Amazon acknowledged in its first-quarter earnings report that it added more warehouse space than it needed during the pandemic, resulting in an extra $2 billion in costs for the quarter.
In the company’s second quarter earnings report this past July, Jassy said in a statement: “Despite continued inflationary pressures in fuel, energy, and transportation costs, we’re making progress on the more controllable costs we referenced last quarter, particularly improving the productivity of our fulfillment network.”
Revenue for the second quarter came in at $121.2 billion, up 7% year-over-year, exceeding the top end of Amazon’s guidance. It was also the same year-over-year growth rate in the first quarter — the slowest rate for Amazon in two decades.
