Company reputation hurts prospects?

At Amazon it was almost impossible to fill vacancies at one point, we were offering jobs paying in the region of $250-300k usd, and we just could not fill the positions.

It even got to the point where we were having monthly meetings with recruitment, so we could as individuals - go through our LinkedIn contacts and friends trying to get new hires.

But in the end it was all just covid bloat, and now they’re cutting so many :(

Finding good people is very hard, it’s true that you get heaps of applicants, but so many of them are a waste of time, some of them are outright liars and scammers.
 
We did similar last year, even made fancy reportage videos to encourage candidates. Salaries were high but the talent pool was dry.

As you say it doesn’t matter now. I had 6 open vacancies until they got cut (my team is 50 odd) and now we’ll have to just get on with it. As everyone is cut there will be less to do or it will just take longer. It’s the froth being blown off. We still do a great job and make money. That is what you have to look at.
 
Screeeech said:
At Amazon it was almost impossible to fill vacancies at one point, we were offering jobs paying in the region of $250-300k usd, and we just could not fill the positions.

It even got to the point where we were having monthly meetings with recruitment, so we could as individuals - go through our LinkedIn contacts and friends trying to get new hires.
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That was a meme at some point, I remember seeing someone on tech or finance Twitter sharing a LinkedIn screenshot of DM's and there were like 15+ messages from Amazon recruiters!

I guess on one hand they're not going to drop their standards, they're still going to have a standard FAANG style interview with leetcode type questions + some Amazon-specific fluff ones, does this candidate talk a good game re: Amazon's published values etc.. on the other hand they do seem to have a reputation for shorter tenure/higher turnover so I guess they have needed to hire a lot more, especially while tech firms have been expanding headcounts.
 
dowie said:
That was a meme at some point, I remember seeing someone on tech or finance Twitter sharing a LinkedIn screenshot of DM's and there were like 15+ messages from Amazon recruiters!

I guess on one hand they're not going to drop their standards, they're still going to have a standard FAANG style interview with leetcode type questions + some Amazon-specific fluff ones, does this candidate talk a good game re: Amazon's published values etc.. on the other hand they do seem to have a reputation for shorter tenure/higher turnover so I guess they have needed to hire a lot more, especially while tech firms have been expanding headcounts.
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The biggest problem were the horror stories which have been circulating for years, many people I know simply didn't want the agro or didn't want to take the risk, especially the more senior guys who just don't need the stress.

Although, i will say that many of the horror stories on the AWS side were the result of people being unable to say "No", or foreign workers in Ireland who were totally unaware of their rights or employment laws.

They'd be worked to the bone, and be afraid to say no to anybody in fear of being put on a PIP, looking weak or losing their visa and having to go back home. Whereas guys like me simply refuse to work until 11pm every day, unless there's some critical incident, planned work or I'm oncall - my laptop gets shut at 6pm every night, no exceptions. (Amazon don't like guys like me :D )
 
Screeeech said:
They'd be worked to the bone, and be afraid to say no to anybody in fear of being put on a PIP, looking weak or losing their visa and having to go back home. Whereas guys like me simply refuse to work until 11pm every day, unless there's some critical incident, planned work or I'm oncall - my laptop gets shut at 6pm every night, no exceptions. (Amazon don't like guys like me :D )
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If your paid for it then there's no problems with it as long as you don't get burn out. Which happens to about 100% of people who just keep working - eventually it comes and you either start falling asleep at work or you die trying.
 
GaryTheSnail said:
If your paid for it then there's no problems with it as long as you don't get burn out. Which happens to about 100% of people who just keep working - eventually it comes and you either start falling asleep at work or you die trying.
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Pretty much.

My manager was once bragging that he'd been up at 6am and was likely going to be working until 11pm and he loved it. I was like "yeeeeeaaaahh.." it'll catch up with you eventually..

Burnout wrecks entire teams, it got to the point with us - where we had work for 100 people, but we had about 12 - it was just miserable, nobody talked, socialised or anything - there was just no time.

Technically the work was amazing, in terms of the stuff I got to do, but doing it in that way - where the only stuff you're working on, is whatever has been on fire for the longest totally sucks, and just as you're finishing that job - the other 3-4 things in your queue are already on fire.
 
Screeeech said:
Pretty much.

My manager was once bragging that he'd been up at 6am and was likely going to be working until 11pm and he loved it. I was like "yeeeeeaaaahh.." it'll catch up with you eventually..
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The only time that is acceptable is when you are running your own company. Doing that for someone else's company on an regular basis!?!?!?! They can jog on!
 
I applied for a job at Amazon a few years back, got ghosted after the 3rd interview by the dedicated in-house recruiter, I knew it wouldn't be good news or I would've heard something, but in the end I had to go to the general candidate support email address to find out the outcome.
Really poor recruitment process, all they needed to do was send me a one line automated email saying thanks but no thanks, that would have been massively cheaper than dealing with me sending them multiple emails, then their own internal functions having to look up what the outcome was for some random candidate and sending a bespoke reply.
If they are/were as disorganised as that I'm not surprised they struggled to fill roles.
 
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HangTime said:
I applied for a job at Amazon a few years back, got ghosted after the 3rd interview by the dedicated in-house recruiter, I knew it wouldn't be good news or I would've heard something, but in the end I had to go to the general candidate support email address to find out the outcome.
Really poor recruitment process, all they needed to do was send me a one line automated email saying thanks but no thanks, that would have been massively cheaper than dealing with me sending them multiple emails, then their own internal functions having to look up what the outcome was for some random candidate and sending a bespoke reply.
If they are/were as disorganised as that I'm not surprised they struggled to fill roles.
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I've been through the AWS interview process; it's a total ballache, and no wonder they struggle to recruit anyone. They make a big deal about 'raising the bar', but none of the people I was interviewed by was particularly impressive. I wonder how AWS is getting on, considering a large part of their comp is based on RSU's and the stock has tanked recently.

The eye-opening thing for me is the difference in salary depending on geography. The same grade + role for the west coast US can pay £240k/$300k (base, bonus, RSU) vs UK £130k/$160k (base, bonus, RSU).
 
Lots of changes going on with Amazon - AWS, Amazon Drive, Smile, etc. I had to kind of facepalm at the information I got on the relevant products which I have with them when seeing why they were winding them down or changing them - one of them the range of products just wasn't attractive or what a large amount of their users/potential users were asking for - but they weren't listening to any feedback which didn't say what they wanted to hear - some slight tweaks to the product stack and it would have seen far more uptake, next one having the impact they wanted to see was something entirely in their hands but instead were palming it off rather than take responsibility for making it work... and so on.
 
HangTime said:
I applied for a job at Amazon a few years back, got ghosted after the 3rd interview by the dedicated in-house recruiter, I knew it wouldn't be good news or I would've heard something, but in the end I had to go to the general candidate support email address to find out the outcome.
Really poor recruitment process, all they needed to do was send me a one line automated email saying thanks but no thanks, that would have been massively cheaper than dealing with me sending them multiple emails, then their own internal functions having to look up what the outcome was for some random candidate and sending a bespoke reply.
If they are/were as disorganised as that I'm not surprised they struggled to fill roles.
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Not only Amazon are doing this but its becoming a trend. All these companies putting you through marathon interviews. Then you never hear from them again.

I missed the days you had one or two interviews then you find out the next day or same week if you got the job or not.
 
I've got no issue with long interview processes per se but I just don't understand the lack of comms. They save themselves 2mins not clicking Reject Candidate but it must cost them more than that dealing with me hassling them for an update afterwards. It's just bad for their internal efficiency, never mind the candidate experience. I don't even need any feedback (although it would be nice to know why they chose not to proceed with me) just a simple one-liner to state they won't be proceeding with my application beyond the most recent interview.
 
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