Hiring remains a challenge says Amazon's consumer chief

CEO of Amazon's Worldwide Consumer business, Dave Clark said on Sunday that the "very tight" labor market poses a challenge for the world's largest online retailer despite the thousands of new hires joining the company during the holiday season. 

Clark said in an interview with "Face the Nation" that Amazon had great success in recent hiring with 45,000 new employees onboarded last week. But he noted that in some parts of the country, it has been difficult to fill in positions, especially in metropolitan areas. He also said that he has been hearing from many small businesses about the challenges they face to hire employees and said that workers are now looking at their lives differently due to the covid 19 pandemic. He added," People have evaluated what kind of jobs do they want to have. Do they want to be in the food-service business? Do they want to be in retail, or do they want to be in fulfillment? Do both people in the family want to work? So many things have changed for people during the course of the pandemic that it's hard to say one particular thing." 

Amazon was able to weather some of the challenges caused by the labor shortage by increasing wages, offering incentives to new hires including signing bonuses of up to $3,000. "We are hiring a lot of people and people continue to be attracted to the great offer we have in pay. It's $18 on average and lots of hiring incentives that are kind of unprecedented, really, of these sorts of $3,000 sign-on bonuses, lots of extra hourly incentives." 

Source: CBS News