Amazon: Sourcing Hundreds of Candidates Across Six Countries in Record Time

Scope & Scale

Across Europe, Amazon were experiencing large levels of growth across their customer base. This had a significant impact on their worldwide operations business, the area of the organization that is responsible for delivering packages and products to the customer’s door.

Amazon’s heavy investment in new fulfilment and delivery centers across Europe, including Germany, France, UK, Spain, Czech Republic and Poland, resulted in a significant increase in headcount across management positions in these centers. These ranged from graduates to experienced managers running the centers themselves.

With Amazon, speed of delivery and their obsession with data feeds into everything they do, and their approach to recruitment is no different. As they can executed new super centers at a flick of a switch, their templated approach to building them created hiring spikes that had to be met in a small window of time.

Situation

Engaging a large volume of candidates across multiple countries speaking different languages and operating under different employment laws presented a unique challenge. Amazon have a large internal talent acquisition team who speak multiple languages, however the sheer volume of roles meant their needed a boost to truly engage the market and candidates in a way that matched their values.

Giving a great candidate experience is paramount for Amazon. Plus, the urgency of the roles and complex nature of the situation, motivated Amazon to engage PeopleScout to partner with them to meet these demands.

Solution

PeopleScout have two established delivery centers in Bristol (UK) and Krakow (Poland). These centers have multilingual recruitment consultants who are experts in sourcing and engaging candidates on our client’s behalf. Having understood the immediate and urgent need from Amazon we quickly mobilized a team of German, French, Spanish, Polish and English speakers across the two centers.

Amazon arranged briefings with us for the various roles and again expressed the urgency required due to the operational go-live dates of their fulfilment centers. Using our experience of recruiting across Europe, plus the understanding of the roles, Amazon’s culture and their process, we were able to build strategies to engage talent pools quickly. This included custom job adverts in each language and candidate engagement in their own native language.

Results

Our multi-national set of stakeholders are happy with our delivery from a quantity and quality level. Our activity resulted in delivering:

• 576 candidates submitted
• 443 invited to interview
• 112 offers made
• 8% reduction in time-to-hire