27,000 Employees Reduced By Amazon; But Company Denies Any Firing, Only Change In ‘Hiring Plan’

The ecommerce giant Amazon was in the news for firing its employees whereas it refuted the claims of the same and said instead that the hiring plans have been changed.

Decreased Headcount

The earnings report by Amazon indicates that it now has 100,000 fewer staff, however there is no mention of the fact that employees were laid off. Citing attrition as the reason behind a decreased headcount, it did not fill the positions that were left vacant after the employees left and the same have been vacant for quite some time now.

Amazon CFO, Brian Olsavsky said in the earnings report that the headcount has been reduced by almost 27,000. He said that “On the head count, yes, I think there was more, as we mentioned in Q1 we added 14,000 workers. Prior Last year, we had reduced our net head count by 27,000. So, we were pretty transparent about the fact that we had hired a lot of people in Q1 for the coverage of the Omicron variant. Luckily, that variant subsided, and we were left with a higher head count position. That has come down through adjusting our hiring levels and normal attrition and was pretty much resolved by the end of April or early part of May. So that is dominating the quarter-over-quarter reduction in head count,”

Google, Apple Jump on the “Hiring Slowdown” Bandwagon

Not just Amazon, another tech giant Google has also informed about the a slowdown in hiring wherein the company CEO Sundar Pichai informed it to the employees about the same in the memo.

He said that “Because of the hiring progress achieved so far this year, we’ll be slowing the pace of hiring for the rest of the year, while still supporting our most important opportunities. For the balance of 2022 and 2023, we’ll focus our hiring on engineering, technical and other critical roles, and make sure the great talent we do hire is aligned with our long-term priorities.Moving forward, we need to be more entrepreneurial, working with greater urgency, sharper focus, and more hunger than we’ve shown on sunnier days”.

The Cupertino based Apple, too is planning to slowdown the hiring process and rather focus on the potential divisions to cope with a potential economic slump.