Amazon has announced that it’s recruiting 100,000 new staff this year in the US. This is the fourth mass hiring spree by the e-commerce giant over the last few months. Amazon has benefited massively from the COVID-19 pandemic. As people stay home to avoid contracting the virus, online sales have boomed.
The e-commerce giant, in an effort to deliver packages across the US and meet rising demand, has hired hundreds of thousands of new staff. It seems more could still be needed even as several states continue to maul over reopening plans.
This latest hiring spree will represent roughly a 10% expansion in Amazon’s workforce, an unprecedented feat accomplished in just a few months. Amazon is also expanding its footprint in an effort to serve customers better. The e-commerce platform has confirmed that it is opening 100 new operations sites this month. It’s believed that most of the 100,000 employees coming on board will be deployed into these new sites.
The company is expected to continue this expansion as well in the coming months. In fact, in 2020 alone, Amazon has opened 75 new operation centers. Add the 100 proposed for this month and you get nearly 175 in just 9 months or so. The new hiring spree is also expected to help the company reach a new milestone.
The giant will now have over 1 million employees under its belt, making it one of the largest corporations by employee volume in the world. Amazon’s sales are expected to continue growing too, even as the biting effects of the pandemic start to ease in the US and Canada. Early estimates show year on year sales for 2020 will expand by double digits.
Nonetheless, the e-commerce giant has come under sharp criticism for not doing enough to prevent price gouging on its platform. Just a few weeks into the pandemic, it emerged that sellers on Amazon had in fact hiked the price of normal pandemic essentials. At one point, the sellers were selling a normal bottle of sanitizer for 14 times more than the typical price.
Amazon also faced accusations that it was doing very little to protect its workers against COVID-19. While the retail giant maintained that all employees working on its warehouses were screened for the virus regularly and supplied with the required Personal Protective Equipment, several infections in its facilities were reported. Despite these issues, it’s clear that the e-commerce giant is the ultimate winner in these dark times.
There’s no doubt that Amazon is serving a demand in the market that has been occasioned by a pandemic beyond its control. The e-commerce giant has, however, worked harder to take advantage of this situation than other players.
At this rate, it’s possible that Amazon will hire more workers over the coming months as it looks to serve customers under lockdowns and other COVID restrictions. It will be interesting to see though if the company will maintain this rapid pace of growth once the worst of this pandemic is over.
