Member-only story

Amazon Hiring Services

Kevin LaBuz
5 min readDec 14, 2020

--

If Amazon’s workforce were a state, its population would be bigger than Montana and smaller than Maine. Globally, the company employs over 1.2 million people. As one of the primary beneficiaries of the Covid-19 feast or famine economy, it has added over 425,000 new employees during the first ten months of the year. Most are in warehouses or operations. According to the New York Times, the closest historical parallel to this is the mobilization of industries like shipbuilding during World War II.

Source: The New York Times, Pushed by Pandemic, Amazon Goes on a Hiring Spree Without Equal, November 27, 2020.

To execute at this scale, Amazon has invested in HR tech infrastructure, including automated hiring. It’s possible to get a job at an Amazon warehouse without talking to anyone. Given the company’s history of eventually selling internally developed capabilities, Amazon Hiring Services is a potential future revenue stream.

Amazon’s First-And-Best Customer Playbook

Amazon isn’t afraid to write big checks. From building Amazon Web Services (AWS) data centers to buying fleets of airplanes for its logistics network, Amazon invests tens of billions of dollars annually. According to Ben Thompson, tech analyst and author of Stratechery, these investments share three characteristics:

  • High fixed costs and economies of scale
  • Amazon is the first-and-best customer, justifying the large upfront…

--

--

Kevin LaBuz
Kevin LaBuz

Written by Kevin LaBuz

Head of IR & Corporate Development at 1stDibs. Previously finance at Etsy, Indeed, and internet equity research at Deutsche Bank. Find me on Twitter @kjlabuz.

No responses yet