- Amazon is re-hiring former workers back into AI and cloud roles
- The company is investigating the impacts of its office-working mandates
- Despite 30,000 layoffs in the past year, Amazon continues to hire for certain roles
Amazon is reportedly trying to re-hire old workers, including many who were affected by previous rounds of layoffs.
Recruiter emails cited by Business Insider reveal that rather than filling roles that have emerged following layoffs, the company is actually targeting specific ex-workers it seems, with the company's cloud computing business predominantly seeing these hiring efforts.
AWS, cloud computing, AI, ML and agentic AI are apparently the focus of these efforts, with one recruiter reportedly referring to the scheme as 'Swami's Boomerang Reengagement Initiative' – Swami Sivasubramanian is a VP for AWS Agentic AI.
Amazon is re-hiring ex-workers back into the company
The company is also said to be making it easier for former employees to return, offering shortened interview processes that may skip over some of the screening steps that aren't all that necessary.
Besides trying to attract former talent, Business Insider also reports that Amazon is digging deeper into why they left, and the potential impacts of its return-to-office (RTO) mandates. Specifically, the tech giant wants to know whether the RTO changes were behind some ex-workers' departures.
While company spokesperson Haley Silva told the publication that Amazon isn't specifically targeting people who left because of the RTO and that its in-office expectations haven't changed, it's an interesting perspective from a company that went pretty much all-in on the RTO years ago in a bid to drive more in-person collaboration and to boost productivity.
All of this comes in the wake of major ongoing layoffs – the company fired around 30,000 workers just in the past year. But it's apparently all part of a broader shift in focus, because instead of cutting headcount as aggressively as that 30k figure suggests, Amazon's more likely looking to lose workers in certain areas of the business and gain workers in more important areas.
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