Yahoo Finance Amazon Freezes Corporate Hiring in Retail Business With Slowing Sales
(Bloomberg) -- Amazon.com Inc. has paused hiring for corporate positions in its retail business, the latest sign that the world’s largest e-commerce company is adjusting its workforce to slowing online sales.
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The company will pause recruitment until the end of the year, according to a person familiar with the matter. The freeze applies to corporate roles in the Worldwide Amazon Stores division, not the warehouse network where most of its employees work, the person said.
“Amazon continues to have a significant number of open roles available across the company,” Amazon spokesman Brad Glasser said in a statement Tuesday. “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 is the latest tech company to try to control costs amid signs of a weakening economy. Meta Platforms Inc. last month announced plans to reduce headcount for the first time.
Chief Executive Officer Andy Jassy has pledged to unwind part of a pandemic-era expansion that saddled Amazon with a surfeit of warehouse space and too many employees. The company has shuttered, delayed or abandoned plans for dozens of warehouses in the US and Europe, Bloomberg reported in September.
Amazon reduced its workforce -- primarily through attrition, the company says -- by almost 100,000 people between March and June, the biggest quarterly decline in its history. Amazon had more than 1.5 million full- and part-time workers as of June 30.
The New York Times earlier reported the freeze on corporate hiring in Amazon’s retail business, citing an internal e-mail. The newspaper said the hiring pause would not affect the company’s highly profitable cloud services unit.
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