While Amazon ceremoniously raised its pay bands earlier this year, the limits on salary offers have effectively negated those increases, the sources added.

Now, anything above 80% of the projected salary requires manager approval, according to sources with direct knowledge of Amazon’s current hiring practices.In the past, for example, recruiters could use an internal calculator to estimate what a person’s four-year salary would look like and offer as much as 120% of that prediction, a mechanism that helped woo top talent who otherwise may have drifted to Microsoft or Google.Across Amazon, including in AWS, recruiters are also limited in how high a salary they can offer prospective employees. “We have many different businesses at various stages of evolution, and we expect to keep adjusting our hiring strategies in each of these businesses at various junctures.”īut even recruitment for open roles has gotten more difficult. “Amazon continues to have a significant number of open roles available across the company,” the spokesperson said.The company says it continues to hire - which has been Amazon’s public message since the downturn started - and instead says it is simply refocusing recruitment efforts on more-strategic roles. Amazon disputed the notion there was a freeze in hiring in devices, which houses Alexa and perhaps soon iRobot: “The message shared last week identified the roles recruiters will prioritize in the short term,” an Amazon spokesperson said in an emailed statement.College recruits for that division will also now be sent to other units, the sources said. In other divisions, such as devices, hiring has been significantly, if not entirely, curtailed. Recruiters are unable to extend offers to candidates in some divisions, like Amazon Music, sources told me. And because Amazon’s a rare bright spot in the increasingly gloomy tech sector, its cost-cutting measures should send a dire message to most other businesses. One of the country’s largest employers, it's showing it’s not immune to the economic uncertainty weighing down everyone from Alphabet to Zoom.

Amazon hiring