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Comment by tryitnow | Hacker News Reader

Great clickbait. The first sentence provides crucial context - Amazon wants to hire 30K. So they had, on average, about 7 applications for every job.

That actually doesn't seem so great.

It's even less impressive when it's incredibly easy to get a ton of low-quality matches when recruiting.

So if Amazon execs wanted to tout a big number of applications they could just advertise these positions in a wildly aggressive way so as to get a ton of poor quality matches. And I'm willing to bet this is exactly what they did.

This actually makes me a lot less inclined to work at Amazon - it seems like they're just playing a numbers game, not really trying to recruit for cultural fit.

I wonder how many of these people will be laid off within 3 years of being hired.

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They were hiring in 6 cities, so that's an average of 30k applicants per location. That's a heck of a lot for a single community, even in a large city. How many businesses get tens of thousands of job applicants at a single location?

One of the locations is Arlington Virginia, the future location of HQ2, but they're only hiring 400 there now. In future they expect that will go up to 24k, which is about 10% of the population of the city!

Sure 10% of that city, but there's quite a bit more population in under 30 minutes of driving.

I did a 15 miles radius arround Arlington on that tool [1] and it say 2,787,933 people, thus closer to 1% of the population.

[1] https://www.freemaptools.com/find-population.htm

Amazon has a huge amount of churn. Most employees only stick around for 2 years and then leave shortly afterwards (once the cash bonuses stop and they start dribbling out stock instead).

but were all 30k jobs listed? I'm assuming the positions listed were nowhere near close to the positions they need to hire for. As in, they probably havent even listed for a lot of the roles.

That said, I really didn't read the article :o

You can assume if they wanted to hire 30k people they probably have a listing that applies to more than one position.

sure, but what i'm saying, is were all the actual unique positions listed, not were each individual position for each job listed .... make sense?

What benefit would they have to do that? They need to hire 30k people, if more roles evolve as they interview and realize they need them they'll make them but then again, if you're hiring 30k people at once you probably have a good idea of who you need to hire all the way up and down the management chain.

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