Amazon has reportedly frozen the corporate hiring for its retail business through the rest of 2022.
That hiring freeze includes technology positions, according to a new report in The New York Times. However, Amazon Web Services (AWS) will keep hiring. “Amazon continues to have a significant number of open roles available across the company,” Brad Glasser, an Amazon spokesman, told the newspaper.
The hiring freeze is a significant reversal from late last year, when new Amazon CEO Andy Jassy announced a hiring spree for 55,000 technologists and corporate employees. (At the time, job postings suggested Amazon’s most-desired tech skills included software development, Java, Amazon Web Services (AWS), C++ and Python, which is unlikely to change anytime soon.) Through the second quarter of 2022, Amazon was also paying out “record” amounts of stock to employees in a bid to retain them.
Amazon isn’t the only company that’s slowing or freezing its hiring. Both Google and Meta have instituted hiring freezes (with the latter reportedly beginning “quiet” layoffs that could impact up to 15 percent of the workforce). Although the tech giants continue to earn billions of dollars, the current economic uncertainty is driving many executives to consider the free-spending ways of the past few years.
Overall tech hiring remains robust, and the tech unemployment rate stood at 2.3 percent in August, according to an analysis of data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). “Stability in tech hiring continues to be an over-arching theme this year,” Tim Herbert, chief research officer at CompTIA, wrote in a statement accompanying that data. “Despite all the economic noise and pockets of layoffs, aggregate tech hiring remains consistently positive.”
Despite news of hiring freezes and layoffs, companies in a variety of industries (such as retail, manufacturing, and more) are still hungry for technologists with a variety of skills, from building websites to ensuring the security of the tech stack. Even as some companies pull back from hiring, others are still going on sprees, at least for now.
