Amazon is expanding its operations team in the US by 25 percent, after the company announced that it will hire an additional 5,000 staff “to meet growing customer demand.”
Currently Amazon’s fulfillment business has 20,000 employees that manage various aspects of its operations, including business analysis, inventory management, customer delivery and engineering processes.
The company hasn’t broken down the hiring spree by specific positions, but it says there are roles within its fulfillment network — such as picking, packing and shipping customer orders — across 17 centers. It will also hire 2,000 full-time and part-time customer service representatives.
“We’re hiring more than 5,000 people to join our team and help us continue to innovate and serve our customers,” Dave Clark, VP of worldwide operations and customer service at Amazon, said in a statement.
Amazon has more than tripled its staff over the last three years, and the company’s payroll currently counts 97,000 employees across all divisions. That’s well ahead of Google and just 2,000 short of Microsoft’s full-time employee roster, underlining Amazon’s emergence as a modern day tech giant.
While last week’s Q2 2013 financial results disappointed — coming in at a net loss of $7 million, despite sales revenue increasing 22 percent year-on-year to $15.7 billion — CEO Jeff Bezos “doesn’t concern himself” with Amazon’s quarterly progress or the reaction of investors and Wall Street, according to a recent report from BusinessWeek.
News of the expansion comes days before President Obama is scheduled to visit Amazon’s fulfillment center in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
Headline image via David McNew/Getty Images
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