Amazon is going on a hiring spree that will push its global headcount to new heights.
The company has added 175,000 temporary positions since March and plans to add more than 133,000 employees to its ranks over the next several months. These positions are in addition to the 876,000 permanent employees that Amazon employed as of July, and could push Amazon's global headcount — including permanent and temporary hires — up to roughly 1.2 million workers.
Amazon's recent hiring surge has been driven by the exponential growth in online sales amid the pandemic. But before the pandemic, the company was already growing at a quip. Its permanent workforce grew a whopping 34% year-over-year, the company said in July.
In July, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos confirmed that the company directly employed around a million people, according to MarketWatch. That number includes 1750,000 temporary seasonal workers hired during the pandemic. When it comes to Amazon's physical footprint, the company also set to convert Ohio's infamous dead Rolling Acres Mall to a robotics sortable facility employing 1,500 workers, according to the Beacon Journal.
But Amazon's recent hiring spree is not the largest confirmed increase to the company's workforce to date. The company saw its biggest permanent workforce spike between 2016 and 2017, when 224,600 new full-time and part-time workers came onboard.
Amazon's headcount of 876,000 full-time and part-time workers does not including seasonal employees. An Amazon spokesperson told Business Insider that the company amends its "global headcount numbers once a quarter during our earning filing," meaning that the next update will occur in October.
Amazon has hired thousands of new employees every year since 2009. Starting in 2017, the company began hosting Amazon Job Day events around the country in order to better staff its growing fleet of warehouses. The company's Securities Exchange Commission filings also note that Amazon does not count seasonal employees or independent contractors in its workforce estimates.
It's unclear whether or not 2020 will prove to be Amazon's biggest year for hiring yet, but the e-commerce giant is certainly on the way to significantly expanding its workforce once again.
