Background

Amazon is one of the largest corporations in the world today and it has hundreds of warehouses where thousands of people are working to provide the best customer service experience. There are a variety of full time, part time, and hourly jobs that are available at Amazon. Based on the different types of skill set and experience that candidates have, they can choose to apply from a variety of available openings that Amazon lists in its job portal. It is important to know that the jobs at Amazon are segregated by various departments and teams, which employees can choose to work at. The jobs are also categorized into multiple locations so that candidates can choose from the available locations wherever they want to work.

The comprehensive collection of links below showcase all the programs that Amazon has where aspiring candidates can join to become a part of Amazon. The links below also shares all the individual teams and locations which candidates can choose from. Based on your skill set, you can choose from a variety of available positions at Amazon, starting from the warehouse jobs to the software engineering and managerial jobs. The variety of part time jobs available at Amazon, which are listed below in the links provided will help you understand each of the roles and responsibilities that is expected as part of that role. It is important to read through the job description that is provided so that you understand fully what you are getting into.

Read more: Is it hard to apply at Amazon? »

Amazon Employee Experiences and Turnover

The hiring process for a warehouse job at Amazon starts from the point where you click the Apply Now button. Make sure in your profile you mentioned all your strengths and experiences so that the hiring manager and recruiter get a feel of you before actually having the phone screening interview round. However, it is important to learn the pros and cons of working in the part time Amazon warehouse jobs. There has been various experiences shared by employees who have been working in Amazon warehouses. Recently there has been a number of reports and papers leaked from Amazon that discusses scenario where Amazon is not able to manage its employee workforce and finances as efficiently as we want it to.

Let us learn about some of these in more details. The consumer strategy and talent development team at Amazon had lacking of a strategy and vision due to which Amazon predicted that there was about $715 million of potential waste. This is because there were expenses to maintain the teams and in addition, there were employees who were constantly leaving the organization and who have to be retrained repeatedly due to which the cost of trainers and managers considerably rose. There are thousands of employees at Amazon as part of its Amazon warehouses and other jobs where employees had an extremely high turnover rate. A high turnover rate indicated that employees were constantly leaving the organization and the positions needed to be refilled with fresh candidates who had no experience often.

Amazon Talent Loss and Financial Impact

Due to high attrition, the expenses on training were considerably high, because Amazon was not addressing the attrition problem due to which employees were keeping on leaving. There were concerns raised by employees regarding the stress and work culture along with complaints regarding fairness of the promotion process. Due to these reasons, the training expenses at Amazon kept going high. And at the same time, Amazon kept losing valuable knowledge and resources to other competitor companies. For a company as big as Amazon, training is considered one of the most important parts and having a lack on that meant a dangerous trend. Regretted attrition, i.e. where employees are leaving on their own, contributed to a large number of the turnover at Amazon.

A loss of $8 billion dollars due to the turnover and attrition is putting a real stress and strain on Amazon. Now that these reports are publicly released, even in the draft state, it is creating a lot of uncertainty and creating questions regarding how well Amazon is being driven by the management right now. Various insider reports have also predicted that even 10 to 15% reduction in attrition would result in millions of dollars of savings at Amazon and it might even become close to a billion dollars if employees stayed at the company for a longer time than what they are currently doing. Many employees who are working at Amazon for some time now believe that these figures present a sorry state of affairs at Amazon, and a complete lapse of internal controls and performance measurement analytics.

Amazon Employee Grievances

There are various internal controls that are set up in Amazon which has policies and procedures to comply to. In totality, these controls comprise of the company's strategic mission and define where the company's headed, thus creating the financial statements at the end of the quarters. However, if there is a gap in these processes and policies, then the overall financial statements will take a hit because the expenses are not getting processed as efficiently as they should be. However, it is seldom found that Amazon is non compliant with SEC filings even though these controls should be in place. However, even with these minimal controls for a company as large as Amazon, employees are still feeling the stress and work culture where they cannot sustain.

Companies like Amazon should have efficient managers with defined internal control processes that help identify your weaknesses, and has to report them to mitigate them as soon as possible. The auditors who work at Amazon should also be able to help in these situations, but it looks like the implied turnover rate is speaking otherwise. Employees keep complaining about the Amazon work culture and hardly any employee survive beyond the initial three months, after which they leave the organization for better opportunities. Many employees have also complained of back pain and exhausted work hours where they are not allowed to take leaves during peak holiday seasons when sales are high.

Amazon Internal Training Program Lapses

The fact that Amazon had internal reports of the variety of lapses in its training programs where employees were not required to complete the learning to be compliant with the learning programs indicated that Amazon was aware of these issues and had to resolve them. These were often not reported in many of its reports in the auditors and had never earlier produced any adverse opinion of Amazon. It is interesting to note that there has been changes in the annual filings done by Amazon in the last 20 years, where they have renamed their employees subsection of its preamble to human capital. In that same year, it has been reported that Amazon rephrased the statement that they consider employee relations to be good.

The variety of learning and development programs at Amazon appears to be disorganized and creating little impact in the learning and development of its employees. As a result, these learning and development expenses are proving to be wasteful for Amazon, because the resources are also leaving the organization after working for only a few months. It has been reported that every year thousands of workers churn through the fast mechanism of hiring and monitoring and layoff at Amazon. The process has become more extreme during the recent years. It has been shared by various employees working at Amazon that one day, they might see an email from Amazon, which made no sense to them.

Amazon Employee Communication Challenges

Employees indicated that Amazon had notified their manager and human resource department about their return to work on a particular date for the night shift. This incident happened even after the candidates had reported that they were severely ill and would not be able to attend such odd requests. This was extremely alarming. When the candidate tried to reach out via email and call to Amazon, the automated systems were found to be dead ends. The benefits provided by Amazon to its employees are extremely generous, but candidates have often been left panicking because many of their disability payments had been mysteriously halted. One of the candidates reported that they spoke to several human resource workers and finally one of them reinstated the payments.

But often it has been reported by many candidates who has shared their experiences that the dialogue often reverted to phone trees or replies, and a variety of different voicemail messages. These calls often came asking if the candidate is coming back to work because Amazon has specifically mentioned that the candidate needs to report back to work even though the candidates were on leave. Candidates finally understood that Amazon did not fully register their situation and the seriousness of their disability, due to which they kept calling back. Such experiences are commonly reported in some of the Amazon fulfillment centers in many of America's largest cities.

Amazon Large Workforce Management

In New York, people have seen classic industry suffering massive collapse and situations where warehouses have absorbed a variety of employees from hotel workers, actors, bartenders and dancers with their attractive wage as mentioned above. Customers today are often hesitant to shop in person and prefer to shop online. This new drive has created a new sense of mission and a set of new workforce requirement, which is hiring a lot of employees at Amazon. The shipping records have often surpassed earlier records to reach record breaking levels and often surpassed combined profits of a couple of earlier years. The success of Amazon and the speed and the agility had been made possible by finding a variety of ways of managing the workforce.

Amazon has successfully been able to manage its vibrant workforce by the use of technology and relying on system that created a team effort between machines and humans. However, every system has some weak points and Amazon was no exception. There were some gaps that was found in the work culture of Amazon. These gaps were not frequently reported and covered in the analytics report that the Amazon senior management processed. However, employees were starting to feel that there were some concerns and challenges that were not getting addressed. Every large organization like Amazon should have employee grievance and redressal system where a continuous feedback loop should exist.

Amazon Employee Feedbacks and Panics

The organization should be making decisions based on the feedback it is receiving resulting from its policies. As a company, Amazon was proud to have precise and sophisticated processing of packages. And it had a model of managing people which was heavily reliant on chatbots and apps. Even before the stressful situation in the economy started a few years back, Amazon had ongoing concerns that were developing in the organization. Employees are burning out while working at Amazon in a high stress situation, and there have been reports of multiple inadvertent firings and layoffs. Many employees at Amazon have also complained about stalled benefits and impacted communication which is not at par with a company as large and as good as Amazon.

There has been certain exceptions to the different types of leniency that were provided by Amazon to its employees. Amazon has taken unprecedented steps over the years to offer a lot of flexibility to its employees when they encounter emergency scenarios. However, certain workers such as in the cases mentioned above, were required to do mandatory overtime after they were asked to take as much unpaid time off as needed. These personal leaves were offered with great ease to Amazon employees. However, there were jamming up the system that often created a lot of challenges. The system encountered issues and sent out multiple job abandonment notices to multiple workers, which created a lot of panic and scrambling among the employees at Amazon according to the human resources and warehouse employees.