Amazon
- AWS CMO asked staff to help fill open roles, including by recruiting recently laid-off Meta workers.
- AWS is hiring aggressively despite the company’s mass layoffs earlier this year.
- AWS’s marketing team wants to enhance collaboration, and move away from a siloed operating model.
Months after Amazon’s own job cuts, Amazon Web Services’ marketing chief asked employees to recruit recently laid off Meta workers, saying the organization is understaffed and scrambling to fill open roles.
During an internal staff meeting late last month, AWS Chief Marketing Officer Julia White was asked about attrition in her organization and whether the company was considering compensation changes to improve retention.
White said hiring was the bigger challenge. AWS’s marketing unit had roughly 160 open positions at the time. “That’s a lot,” she said, while stressing that accelerating hiring was one of her top priorities.
“If you have friends and family or colleagues — or I know Meta just laid off 8,000 people — any of those great people you know, ping them,” she said. “We have jobs and we need top talent here.” Business Insider reviewed a recording of the meeting.
The comments highlight a tension inside Amazon as some parts of the company cut jobs while others are competing aggressively for talent.
Amazon spent much of the past year conducting one of the largest layoffs in its history, eliminating more than 30,000 jobs across multiple rounds of cuts, including positions within AWS marketing. Smaller layoffs have continued across parts of Amazon’s retail and robotics organizations in recent months.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy previously said his company’s layoffs were intended to address organizational and cultural issues. The job cuts have unfolded as Amazon is on pace to deploy a record $200 billion on capital expenditures this year.
An Amazon spokesperson said the company has been working to reduce management layers and bureaucracy while continuing to hire in key areas. When announcing layoffs in January, Amazon said it would keep investing in “strategic areas” critical to its future.
“We’re focused on hiring and developing the best talent at AWS and across Amazon’s range of businesses,” the spokesperson said in a statement.
‘It’s a hot market’
White said attrition within AWS’s marketing unit remains higher than she would like, though it has stabilized and is beginning to trend lower.
“It’s a hot market,” she said. “Our talented people are in high demand.”
White said compensation is one of the factors that comes up in exit interviews and that AWS is “trying to take the right compensation actions to make sure that people feel fairly compensated.” Amazon’s pay model has been flagged internally as a headwind in the competition for top talent, Business Insider previously reported.
But she said pay is not the primary reason employees leave.
“Compensation is one of the things, but it’s not the top one,” White said, adding that employees also cite lifestyle considerations, career growth opportunities, and other factors.
The Amazon spokesperson told Business Insider the company’s compensation philosophy is “intended to attract, retain, and motivate the highest-caliber talent, and we regularly evaluate our compensation to make sure it’s competitive.”
‘Deeply siloed’
In January, White internally announced the departures of two of the organization’s most senior leaders: Leah Bibbo, a longtime product marketing executive who helped build AWS’s US public relations organization, and Jen Hartford, the veteran marketing leader who helped launch and grow AWS’s annual re:Invent conference.
The leadership changes were accompanied by a reorganization that consolidated several marketing functions under Tim Hoppin, Steve Sloan, and Kristin Shaff.
During last month’s internal staff meeting, White said the team needs to move from a “deeply siloed operating model” to a “much more collaborative one.” The transition has created growing pains as teams learn new ways of working together, she added.
“We have too many handoffs and not enough handshakes,” she said. “We’re in that refinement curve of making sure it’s efficient.”
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