200k people applied for jobs at Amazon in a single week

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/200000-people-applied-for-30000-open-jobs-at-amazon-in-a-single-week/

by onetimemanytime • 7 years ago

154 187 7 years ago

cbsnews.com

domnomnom• 7 years ago

For 30k open positions

rokalakt2• 7 years ago

Less than 4 applicants per seat. Pretty low.

onion2k• 7 years ago

It probably isn't distributed like that though.

gberger• 7 years ago

Huh? 200,000 / 30,000 = 6.667

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noneeeed2• 7 years ago

That is actually a surprisingly good ratio. I work for a company that deals with this kind of data and the applicant to hire ratio at some companies, especially in retail or unskilled jobs can easily hit much, much higher than that.

When I see people complaining about the hiring processes for many low qualification jobs they often have no idea just how many people they are up againt. They get annoyed because they didn't get an interview, but if you are getting 50 applicants for every position you're not going to interview even half of them.

As my boss likes to say, bulk recruitment is an exercise in saying "no" as efficiently and quickly as possible, whilst pissing off as few as possible (you want them to reapply or not hold a grudge against your brand).

Recruitment is very easy to screw up.

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cm2187• 7 years ago

I think my best experience as a (student) job seeker was McKinsey. They called me to provide me some detailed feedback about why they wouldn't hire me. I was very grateful and it is true that it contributes to their brand. The students they turn down may be their client in a distant future.

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pingyong4• 7 years ago

Honestly the rules aren't that difficult (applying them might be). You just have to answer quickly (either with "sorry no" or even with "you're in consideration", really anything), not hearing from people for weeks is the worst. And ideally, provide a reason for why you weren't hired and what they would like to see from you. That's really all. If you do that, people most likely won't hold a grudge. Casually mentioning that there were 50 other applicants probably helps, too. ("Out of the 243 applicants, we are only able interview 10.")

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TrackerFF• 7 years ago

FWIW, one local supermarket cashier job near me got almost 500 applications - so the 3/20 for this isn't horrible.

The last back-end position I applied for had like 15 applicants

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jnmandal3• 7 years ago

Its actually 400 positions according to the article. Another 25000 are to open in the next decade.

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peter303• 7 years ago

There are people who prefer seasonal work. Maybe Xmas and summer gigs with rest of year off. Read the book Nomadland for details.

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C1sc0cat• 7 years ago

That's what I thought, I live near one of the Big Amazon distribution centres in the UK and adds for Amazon Christmas workers are all over the Busses and billboards at this time of year.

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vixen99• 7 years ago

You mean 'ads'.

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cowsandmilk• 7 years ago

These aren’t seasonal positions. From https://www.cbsnews.com/news/amazon-jobs-to-hire-30000-peopl... :

Amazon said all of the openings are for full time positions and come with benefits. And the company said the openings are not related to the usual increase in hiring it does to prepare for the busy holiday shopping season.

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brosinante• 7 years ago

The industry has disconnected itself so much from actual human beings that "There are people who prefer seasonal work" is a valid response.

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jnmandal3• 7 years ago

Yeah, this whole comment section is a dumpster fire I noticed. A bunch of people didn't even read the article.

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rb808• 7 years ago

My wife does seasonal work. Retail related in last few months of year and tax stuff in tax season. She then has Summer off, its great.

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harry82• 7 years ago

Is that an audited number? Smells like a corporate pr piece...

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jdc2• 7 years ago

Bingo.

https://www.google.com/search?q="Thousands+of+job-seekers+fl...

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klohto• 7 years ago

Current media recycles headlines to save on work cost. When you have to churn out 20 articles per day, you don’t have many options left. This doesn’t prove anything.

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fuzz4lyfe2• 7 years ago

The narrative that the labor market is full and therefore wages must remain low must be preserved at all costs.

200k people applied for 30k jobs that's less than 10/1 anyone who has done hiring in IT knows that roughly 1/10 applicants are even qualified for a particular position.

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therealcamino• 7 years ago

If you click through, it's bylined CBS News on those sites. That's not regurgitating PR, that's syndication.

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CaptainZapp• 7 years ago

Well, they have to counter some really, really bad pr, like this piece[1] after all.

[1] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/carolineodonovan/amazon...

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theomega• 7 years ago

Only slightly related: If I open the link on my iOS device, music playing stops (Spotify). Somehow CBS manages with their useless auto play videos to kill my background music playing. Should this be possible? I thought there is no auto play video on IOS?

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fuzz4lyfe2• 7 years ago

In chrome you can often force auto play by playing a sound (and having that fail) and then playing another sound right after that. Maybe IOS has a similar loophole?

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davnicwil2• 7 years ago

Is there some kind of legitimate reason it has to work this way that this workaround takes advantage of, or is it just an oversight/bug?

How you're describing it it sounds like they only block the first sound you try to auto play - if the latter is the reason then that's really surprising.

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bobsoap• 7 years ago

On Android, in Firefox, they cover the bottom third of the screen with a permanent notification that you can't close and contains two links: open in CBS app, and open in Chrome.

Looks like they don't really want my traffic. Oh well.

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jnmandal3• 7 years ago

What's funny is actually that "chrome" option was just a stand in for "browser". I was also in Firefox and I clicked "continue in chrome" and the notification just went away. IIRC Reddit was first site to do this.

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zxcvbn4038• 7 years ago

Sounds more likely jobs offered in one of the rural areas. I love shopping Amazon and I love their technology even more but their work/life balance is terrible. Their tech guys live in fear, real fear, of being someplace without WiFi. I’d probably only last a year - I go to all the parent/teacher conferences at my kids school and that clearly goes against the grain at Amazon.

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noego2• 7 years ago

Everyone I know at Amazon works 8 hour days, completely disconnect when they finish with work, and have tons of flexibility for working from home when family related issues arise.

I don't doubt that you know specific people who are having the opposite experience - Amazon culture varies a lot based on which vp/director you work for. But your friends' experience isn't indicative of all tech employees.

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akhilcacharya4• 7 years ago

I work at Amazon and this is basically my experience. I don’t know why there’s so much FUD about it, and it’s been the same on other teams I’ve worked on as well.

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burger_moon• 7 years ago

I worked for Amazon until earlier this year. They worked everyone hard as fuck. Even principal engineers worked nights and weekends. It was the worst experience of my life.

For people reading these comments you need to understand these people who say it's blown out of wack and FUD (lmao no) it isn't. And typically the people who get themselves into positions where their job is butter at Amazon is because they threw a bodies on the fire to get there.

It's an awful company to work for if you're a deg. It's even worse if you're a warehouse employee.

When people go on the record stating they have to piss in Gatorade bottle because they don't get sufficient bathroom breaks it's not FUD it's a shitty employer. /Rant

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NoblePublius• 7 years ago

Not in Queens.

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delfinom• 7 years ago

Even in Virginia they only forecast 25 jobs related to the new HQ next year, and maybe, just maybe if their PR magic ball says yes, there might be 25k jobs.....over the next decade PR firm fingers crossed

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rshnotsecure• 7 years ago

This is not unusual. My spouse works for Glassdoor. Entry level programmer jobs in Texas will get 2000 applications (not bots) within about 72 hours. Desperate people from all over the US.

I think at one time the advice to “play the numbers game” was correct for online job apps. Not anymore.

Even more saddening, Glassdoor uses a temp/test sample job ad. It’s for cat sitting. $15/hr. That will get hundreds of apps in 48 hours if someone forgets to take it down (is only supposed to go up for 60 mins max but things happen).

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vectorEQ2• 7 years ago

i just find it funny that theres posts about shortages of it people, and posts about a quarter of a million ppl applying to one company. who's lying. :D

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hoffs• 7 years ago

Just because someone applied doesn't mean they are any good.

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angstrom• 7 years ago

*Shortage of qualified people.

I pity the people that have to filter that.

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csydas2• 7 years ago

Neither :)

You're missing an adjective from your observation: qualified.

For any given position, even when you're pretty specific on the requirements, you will get an onslaught of applicants who have absolutely no business trying to apply for said position, but they do it anyways just because it vaguely matches a skillset they have and they need a job.

This isn't a criticism of such persons; it's foolish for people to think that a word for word perfect job exists just for them, and kudos to those willing to be a bit flexible on what they previously felt were non-negotiable aspects of jobs (I am referring to things I personally consider trivial, in this case, but I feel that when it comes time to start negotiating, said items are thrown out first as bargaining chips)

We have many employers seeking a specific type of qualified person; we have qualified and unqualified people all looking for jobs; it can be a bit messy to sort the two. This is why the interview process exists.

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austincheney• 7 years ago

Applicants are not necessarily qualified. There could be thousands of unqualified people applying for a job and at the same time a shortage of qualified applicants.

There are two reasons for that wide distribution:

1. Lack of preparation/expectation management. I have seen people apply for development jobs with no skills or experience thinking the job is there to train them. It is no surprise (except maybe to the applicant) that they are quickly disqualified. It is absurd how commonly this occurs.

I have also seen college educated computer science graduates get a job and completely struggle. There is some expectation among some of these guys that they deserve an awesome job, because they went to an awesome school, and everybody has always showered them with praise. The worst is when one of these guys get a job writing JavaScript only to discover it isn't anything like the Java they were taught at school. Instead of accepting reality it is simply easier to blame the language and do everything possible to make it behave and look like Java. epic fail.

2. Selective bias. How do you define competent or qualified? This is completely subjective and varies by organization. I have encountered several organizations where the developers cannot read code. They compensate with assertion testing, frameworks, external packages, layers of tooling and so forth. The unwillingness of a candidate to accept that stupidity is certainly an incompatibility and can be seen as a lack of competence. If the interviewing party likely struggles with literacy it is not something they are likely to test for, for example.

In my experience under-confident hiring teams always want super competent applicants until they see what super competence actually is. It sounds absolutely fantastic in theory until they see it in practice. Then the insecurity sets in. What is really tragic about that is not that incompatibilities happen, but that insecure teams often don't see it until far after they have wasted people's time or after they have hired the applicant only to wish they hadn't.

My recommendation for experienced developers is to always identify these incompatibilities as early as possible. Unless equity is attached this is so much more important than compensation.

---

In a perfect world people would learn to read and write code before applying for jobs, which implies literally reading and writing (not tooling or dicking around with layers of abstractions). We don't live in a perfect world as evident by many applicants and employers.

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inoop• 7 years ago

Serious question, have you ever interviewed people for software engineering positions? It's quantity over quality.

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lunchables• 7 years ago

They announced they were hiring 30,000 people. Having even 10 people apple for 1 job isn't highly unusual. So having 200k apply for 30k jobs doesn't seem odd. Plus because its a big announcement from a huge company, it will draw in far more than the usual random job ad on monster.com. I don't see anything surprising about this. One of the largest companies on earth had a huge hiring blitz and it brought in applicants from all over the country (and world, probably).

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cdolan4• 7 years ago

Not to hijack, but do you or your spouse have an opinion on the WSJ story about companies intensely curating their reviews (maybe even paying/threatening the employees and/or Glassdoor)?

I noticed a local company I follow had fluctuating review counts between 30-45. I wrote a web scraper to see if reviews were being taken down, and for this company, over 20 1 or 2 star reviews have been taken down, but any new 5 star reviews stay.

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shiftpgdn• 7 years ago

I had been contacted by a glass door rep about two years ago who "vaguely promised" they could remove our bad reviews if we signed up for one of their paid services.

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ben10402• 7 years ago

I used to work for a place where, during the 60 or 90 day check-in with HR after you got hired, HR would put a hard sell on you to write a Glassdoor review.

It had the effect of flooding it with 4 and 5 star reviews from people who hasn't been around long enough to see any downsides to their job.

Meanwhile, as the company began imploding, the folks jumping ship mostly didn't bother to write a 1 star review on the way out.

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cj2• 7 years ago

It’s worth mentioning that sometimes there are legitimate reasons for removing reviews.

Our company had a slew of negative reviews suddenly. Upon closer look, the reviewers were working in positions we had never employed anyone for. They were posting about an office they worked at in Israel (we are in the USA).

Turns out there was another startup in Israel who had a very similar name to ours. That company closed a big seed round and started hiring a bunch of people (and apparently they don’t treat their employees well, based on the reviews mistakenly left on our page).

The process of getting the reviews removed was a major pain. It requires multiple emails and phone calls with Glassdoor. Ironically, Glassdoor sales reps started up selling us on a premium Glassdoor account after we had a sudden uptick if views on our company (which were actually from people trying to see reviews for the other company in Israel) so we also leveraged the sales process to push Glassdoor into looking at the legitimacy of the reviews.

I definitely wouldn’t say it was an easy process. Glassdoor was, by default, resistant and skeptical about any complaint relating to a request to remove a review. It took multiple months (and persistence) to convince them the reviews were not for our company.

It’s easy to jump to conclusions about Glassdoor moderating reviews and removing bad ones. But also remember there are cases when reviews are not legitimate and should be removed.

(In addition to the example I provided above, another example is competing companies leaving negative reviews on competitor profiles to sabotage their hiring efforts).

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wastedhours• 7 years ago

Have a paid contract with Glassdoor and they're exceptionally strict and make it known they'll only take down reviews containing blatant falsehoods or proprietary information.

You can flag them, and they'll get looked at - and their definitions of falsehoods or private info are obviously subjective, but it's been made clear to us they can't do anything just because we've paid.

Will see how the contract plays out, but I'm minded to believe them, part of the sales patter is that negative reviews actually help you weed out people who wouldn't fit in so they're already lining you up to think about having negative ones up.

That being said, and though I find their business model disgusting, we definitely weren't a hard sell for them.

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JMTQp8lwXL2• 7 years ago

This sounds like a great weekend project idea: a website that captures removed reviews from Glassdoor and computes a real rating.

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eastendguy• 7 years ago

I can confirm this. I personally know of two companies were accurate but negative reviews were taken down by Glassdoor. One was the company I worked for. In this case it was triggered at the request of the CEO, who was heavily criticized in the reviews. He made HR sign up for a Glassdoor Premium account, so that they took the reviews down.

All negative reviews were 100% accurate from my point of view and not insulting in any way. So if you see the "managed account" flag at Glassdoor, be careful ;)

It seems the trick is to say that the reviews contain "company internal information",...or something like that.

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NeverFade• 7 years ago

In my experience, it's far easier and more common for companies to simply flood their review pool with bogus positive reviews, rather than bother about negative reviews.

Plenty of startup founders boosted their rating by telling HR, family, friends, and foreign clickfarms to post 5 star Glassdoor reviews.

It's extremely easy to inflate your rating this way. Glassdoor does nothing to prevent it. There are small startups with more 5-star Glassdoor reviews than employees.

As long as your bots also upvote every other 5-star reviews, anyone looking at your review pool, sorted either by recency or "most helpful", will have to scroll through dozens of these bogus 5-star reviews before they get to any real negative review. By that point, the negative review will seem like a biased exception posted by a disgruntled employee - if they even get to it.

The worst aspect of this is how easy it is for truly terrible companies to royally screw their employees yet retain an eye-popping 4.2+ rating on Glassdoor. I've seen a couple of cases where companies badly mistreated employees, got a well-deserved torrent of 1-2 star reviews as a result, then flooded their pool with hundreds of fake 5-star reviews. Now these terrible companies, that truly do mistreat and abuse their workforce, have a Glassdoor page and review pool disguising them as a top 1% employer.

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hourislate4• 7 years ago

Entry level programmer jobs in Texas will get 2000 applications

There are some major Corporations here in DFW, some that have hired 1000's of H1B's (Car companies, Airlines, etc). It doesn't surprise me that Americans are desperate for work.

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ahnus62• 7 years ago

What does hiring qualified h1b visa holders have to do with anything? The desperate Americans are not qualified for the job. If they were it would be in the company’s best interest to hire the American.

The h1b program requires paying a local market wage. Even if you don’t believe it does the effect would be to just lower wages, it would still be better to hire the qualified American at reduced wages rather than sponsor an h1b.

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throwaway57522• 7 years ago

So what. F-1s, OPTs, H1B, are people too and as a rule are taking an enormous risk in life uprooting to a new country and a different language. Most of them have advanced degrees. Hundreds of them apply to open jobs too. They are human beings, and there are a lot of human beings - regardless of arbitrary imaginary lines that divide us - who are looking for work.

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ashelmire• 7 years ago

I think at one time the advice to “play the numbers game” was correct for online job apps. Not anymore.

Are you sure about that? Most of the posts I see from devs who just got well-paying jobs show them applying to 20+ companies. Usually more. Then they'll get interviews at several, offers from 1-5? It's absolutely a numbers game on both sides.

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chooseaname• 7 years ago

This just seems so strange to me. When I look for work, I look for companies doing things I find interesting, then narrow that down to maybe half dozen at most and send them my resume. I don't look for mostly generic developer work, though. I'm pretty specific with the industries and technologies (RFID, HW control systems, etc) (but not necessarily the developer stack; that's easy to get up to speed on).

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mempko• 7 years ago

But we have such a strong economy!

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rayvd• 7 years ago

True, but even at low unemployment levels, 3% of a vast workforce is many millions of people. :)

(Yeah, I know you were being sarcastic, but the economy IS in good shape)

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1123581321• 7 years ago

No matter the strength of the economy, there will be people who are not good at applying for and getting jobs. That’s who most of these applications come from.

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notus3• 7 years ago

I'm a senior software engineer and my experience is much different for contrast. I get a response from almost every place I apply.

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WhompingWindows• 7 years ago

How many years of experience did you have when you got senior title?

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jniedrauer• 7 years ago

I've gotten at least a phone interview from almost every place I've applied over the last half decade, even when I was an entry level programmer. I'm not sure what the deal is. I guess I've just been extraordinarily lucky.

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plausibilities• 7 years ago

If you're not a scrub, go through non-scrub recruiters, and manage to get through a handful of high-vis projects relatively unscathed, word travels extremely quickly and from then on out you can pretty much coast mostly on reputation.

It's a small world out there sometimes.

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dthedev• 7 years ago

How is "playing the numbers game" no longer the good advice? This article (and your comments) only seem to cement that idea further.

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papreclip• 7 years ago

When there are 20 qualified applicants per job you can apply to dozens or hundreds of jobs and beat or negate the unfavorable numbers. When there are hundreds or thousands of applicants for jobs, you can't apply for tens of thousands of jobs. The listings just don't exist. Your only real chance is to find an inside connection and skip the anonymous application portal.

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df• 7 years ago

on the other hand - I can't imagine I'm the only person to have been getting quite a few "come work for us" emails from Amazon via LinkedIn recently (two in the last month, six in the last year). The solicitations do not appear to be very carefully targeted - they seem to mention everything from machine learning to mobile app development.

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save_ferris• 7 years ago

I get so many solicitations from recruiters that clearly didn’t look at my profile (i.e. “looking for Java architect” and I have zero java experience) that I’ve started reporting and blocking them.

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aripickar• 7 years ago

I’ve gotten those and I work for Amazon. The recruiters spam everyone.

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harry82• 7 years ago

and trash amazon's reputation.

Can't even do a mail merge from 1983, wow, AI ML expertise at amazon on show there. I bet it makes you feel valued as an employee too.

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Washuu• 7 years ago

An Amazon recruiter messaged me yesterday and in such:

1.) Used the wrong name repeatedly even after correcting them.

2.) Asking me to apply to a role that is a step down.

3.) "The position you are applying for is in Seattle." - After saying I was not interested in Seattle.

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JCharante• 7 years ago

I figure it's similar to applying to colleges. Stanford, Yale, etc send you info packets and ask you to apply but then reject you. Although some schools figure that if it takes $20 to acquire someone's attention and get them to apply to you (and pay a $90) fee then they can pocket the $70 (minus reviewer expenses) and look more exclusive when it comes to acceptance rates, but that's not the case with companies.

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dominotw• 7 years ago

they send those to everyone. Would be hard to find anyone in tech not contacted by amazon.

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Fins• 7 years ago

Lucky you, to get so few of them. I gopt 4 in just the last month, and usually it's at least one every 3 months.

And that when the first line of my profile very explicitly states that I would never work for Amazon.

Not sure if they are so desperate to get any warm bodies in, or just general Amazon's incompetence.

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astura• 7 years ago

If they have this many applicants then why are their recruiters always contacting me on LinkedIn? Is everyone applying really junior?

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mindfulplay• 7 years ago

I would imagine they have one of the highest attrition rates ever for any tech company.

I am a lifelong Amazon customer but choose never to be an employee of theirs.

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GreenJelloShot2• 7 years ago

I would imagine they have one of the highest attrition rates ever for any tech company.

Pretty much this.

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mcv• 7 years ago

Maybe it's really the other way around: Amazon has been trying to get 200k people to apply to their jobs.

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flyGuyOnTheSly• 7 years ago

And this is why amazon workers are abused. Supply significantly outpaces demand.

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dymk2• 7 years ago

That’s not really abuse then if so many people want to work there. They know what they’re getting themselves into.

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chiefalchemist• 7 years ago

But Craig Newman, who also lives in the area, said he's looking forward to the increase in commuters. "One of the jobs I'm working at now is an Uber driver. I hope Amazon comes to the area and brings in a lot more traffic."

Wish for MORE traffic? The race to the bottom is over, and...no one has won.

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apexalpha• 7 years ago

This is an ad for Amazons job fairs.

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hi412• 7 years ago

My friend’s wife took almost 8 months to find a production support job. Why are jobs so hard to get these days? Is it because competition is so high and for a single job there are 20 applicants?

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bob_theslob646• 7 years ago

Great question. No one seems to know why. The worst part about the job search, is not even getting a response. most companies don't even have an HR function so it's cheaper to just not answer. It's also cheaper not to get into a lawsuit by giving an answer as well which kind of sucks. I wish there was a way to protect companies in their speech so that's not discriminatory to tell them why we didn't choose the candidate.

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hi412• 7 years ago

Thank you for your response.

She applied for 800 job postings. That was the only thing she did the whole day - apply job after job. She maintained an excel file with all the details. Which company she applied for, who responded, who rejected. It was demoralizing. She got a job now but she started the job hunt last November.

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notTyler• 7 years ago

I assume it looks bad if a candidate someone hires ends up being a terrible fit. This is basically how it goes everywhere else at larger companies. Visibility is more important than getting things done.

Like, I'm staffed at a company that isn't Arthur Anderson right now on an internal project and our SM/PO came back from scrum of scrums and said everyone was massively overestimating tasks to make sure they got them in on time. If you finish early you get pushback on starting something else because it looks 'so bad' if work goes from one sprint to the next.

Slow work and hitting metrics > everything, I guess.

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jimbob45• 7 years ago

- H1Bs are cheaper to hire and take the place of American jobs (though to a far lesser degree than you'll hear during this upcoming election

- Everyone is preparing for a recession (for the last three years now)

- Jobs are posted online and get tons of applicants now. That makes it easier to switch cities and not have to go through a period of unemployment but that also means they get tons of applicants. Are many of them bots? You bet.

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azemda• 7 years ago

Are many of them bots? You bet.

Why would someone create bots that apply to jobs? Just nuisance or any intention behind it?

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commandlinefan• 7 years ago

I don't get it either. I found myself involuntarily out of work a couple years ago (company shut down), and it took a month before I finally found something after > 20 applications. Out of at least 20 applications, I only ended up interviewing with two - and I'm qualified as hell for software development. One thing I wonder, though - there's some anecdata that certain qualifications can actually work against you. For example, this lady (http://blog.alinelerner.com/how-different-is-a-b-s-in-comput...) suggests that you consider rejecting anybody with an MS in CS. I've seen many people on here and on Slashdot suggest that they would never consider hiring anybody with an MS certification, for example (and some even saying they'd never hire somebody who went to college!). You never know what weird filter somebody is applying to your resume.

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kamaal• 7 years ago

People expect you to ace rounds of leet code style interviews or worse, whiteboard coding interviews.

A lot of people get filtered out.

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tryitnow• 7 years ago

Great clickbait. The first sentence provides crucial context - Amazon wants to hire 30K. So they had, on average, about 7 applications for every job.

That actually doesn't seem so great.

It's even less impressive when it's incredibly easy to get a ton of low-quality matches when recruiting.

So if Amazon execs wanted to tout a big number of applications they could just advertise these positions in a wildly aggressive way so as to get a ton of poor quality matches. And I'm willing to bet this is exactly what they did.

This actually makes me a lot less inclined to work at Amazon - it seems like they're just playing a numbers game, not really trying to recruit for cultural fit.

I wonder how many of these people will be laid off within 3 years of being hired.

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joshlegs2• 7 years ago

but were all 30k jobs listed? I'm assuming the positions listed were nowhere near close to the positions they need to hire for. As in, they probably havent even listed for a lot of the roles.

That said, I really didn't read the article :o

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sieabahlpark2• 7 years ago

You can assume if they wanted to hire 30k people they probably have a listing that applies to more than one position.

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simonh• 7 years ago

They were hiring in 6 cities, so that's an average of 30k applicants per location. That's a heck of a lot for a single community, even in a large city. How many businesses get tens of thousands of job applicants at a single location?

One of the locations is Arlington Virginia, the future location of HQ2, but they're only hiring 400 there now. In future they expect that will go up to 24k, which is about 10% of the population of the city!

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dwild• 7 years ago

Sure 10% of that city, but there's quite a bit more population in under 30 minutes of driving.

I did a 15 miles radius arround Arlington on that tool [1] and it say 2,787,933 people, thus closer to 1% of the population.

[1] https://www.freemaptools.com/find-population.htm

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GreenJelloShot2• 7 years ago

Amazon has a huge amount of churn. Most employees only stick around for 2 years and then leave shortly afterwards (once the cash bonuses stop and they start dribbling out stock instead).

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thorwasdfasdf• 7 years ago

I'm just glad their new headquarters isn't in New York or California: that would've been terrible. Arlington housing prices are already at 500$/sq foot. i really think they could've still picked a better place.

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williamDafoe2• 7 years ago

The funnel at my company in my division for software is 700:3.

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avgDev• 7 years ago

I had a recruiter reach out to me 3 times now about the job in the new HQ at the alexa team. I'm not interested but I am not surprised so many are applying. Amazon is hiring really aggressively right now.

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williamDafoe2• 7 years ago

People are listening to too much government propaganda. The percentage of Americans employed is actually EXTREMELY low! The gov press releases EXCLUDE all those unemployed pesky minorities with a category called "discouraged"(= non white) workers! Excluding this recovery, employment is at a 35-year low!

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/EMRATIO

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200k people applied for jobs at Amazon in a single week

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