- Amazon is working to cut costs by discontinuing some projects and freezing hiring on most teams.
- Employees whose roles were cut this fall were given three months to find new jobs within the company.
- Amazon has frozen internal transfers, making it harder for some furloughed workers to find new jobs.
Amazon’s corporate employees scrambled to be transferred from units fearing they would be laid off, but the company’s hiring committees found few jobs.
According to a Slack message seen by an insider, and interviews with seven Amazon employees who spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak to the press, Amazon’s hiring freeze announced last week was a result of Amazon’s internal job vacancies. It also extends to bulletin boards.
One Amazon employee said the company has stopped changing jobs for employees who have moved in the past month. This has also raised concerns about immigration status among some workers with work visas, the employee added.
An Amazon spokesperson told Insider that the company’s head of human resources, Beth Galetti, posted a blog last week explaining the company’s decision to “pause new employee hiring.”
“We plan to maintain this moratorium over the next few months and will continue to monitor economic and business conditions and adjust as we see fit,” Galetti said. Garretti wrote that Amazon will continue to fill the talent shortages created by the layoffs, and that there are “some locations” where Amazon will continue to create new jobs.
Amazon, for example, is still adding headcount to satellite Internet venture Project Kuiper, according to employee and job postings. In a blog post, Garetti wrote that Amazon “remains excited” about Kuiper, its self-driving car division Zoox, Prime Video, Grocery, Healthcare and virtual assistant Alexa.
The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday that Amazon is scrutinizing ways to cut costs for the devices organization Alexa belongs to. The division lost nearly $5 billion a year in recent years, the WSJ reported, based on internal documents.
Amazon has also cut headcount in several teams in recent weeks, including autonomous delivery robot Scout, virtual travel experience project Amazon Explore, and live radio venture Amp. The company has given the hundreds of affected employees three months to find new jobs within Amazon, and has promised to help them find jobs internally. Still, some employees whose roles have been eliminated say the lack of new gigs within the company has made it harder to find new roles within Amazon.
In some cases, an employee’s skills may not apply to any of the few published roles, said two employees whose roles were removed. For example, an employee who previously sought out Amp content for his creators may be struggling to find new roles in self-driving car development or satellite internet.
Other employees whose roles were eliminated had an easier time. Two of her other workers whose roles were cut said they found new jobs in-house.
But some employees say the uproar has caused them to give up on Amazon altogether.
“I show little interest in internal debates and concentrate on chasing outside offers and enjoying the lack of work.”
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