Amid Amazon’s second round of mass layoffs announced Monday, a new report by Business Insider suggests that the company posted more than three times the number of approved vacancies in 2022. As per an internal document viewed by Business Insider, the over-hiring situation was created after its web services’ utility computing team shared 24,988 job openings while only 7,798 were in reality given the go-ahead.
The hiring discrepancy led to ‘span of control and level ratio defects’, according to the report. While ‘span of control’ refers to the number of direct reports for each manager, level indicates the seniority of the staff. The report added that defects in the level ratio could suggest the over-hiring of employees who were either too qualified or less qualified for the positions that were not within the allocated budget.
After slashing 18,000 jobs in January this year, the e-commerce giant announced that 9,000 more roles would be cut just three months after. One of the reasons stated for the massive layoffs was over-hiring during the pandemic boom. The latest layoffs are set to impact workers across web services, People, Experience, and Technology (PXT), advertising, and Twitch.
Read: Amazon CEO’s letter to staff as 27,000 workers sacked this year
In the document, as per the report, Amazon accepted the lapse in hiring operations and that its process is prone to ‘inconsistency, error, and potential mis-use’. The report quoted a former recruiting manager, who said that overt hiring had led to company leaders ‘squeezing in people where they could’.
CEO Andy Jassy said the company had added a substantial amount of staff in the past few years, but the uncertain economy has forced it to choose cost and headcount cuts. “Given the uncertain economy in which we reside, and the uncertainty that exists in the near future, we have chosen to be more streamlined in our costs and headcount,” Jassy said in a statement posted on the company’s web site.
Google, Microsoft and Meta were Among other tech giants which initiated huge downsizing efforts in the recent months.
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