Challenges Amazon’s Employee Recruitment: Strategies To Address Them

High Number of Online Applicants

Discuss about the Challenges Amazon’s Employee Recruitment.

As the job market continues to grow, diversity of job seekers grow in return calling for selective recruitment by organizations (Al-Kassem, 2017). Most organizations fail to achieve their objectives when a wrong selection of employees therefore, it is a major challenge for most of the today’s business that aims at growing and managing their cost at the same time. Most companies, therefore always tend to look for diversified qualified employees that are able to generate constructive ideas and create productivity of the organization. To acquire sufficient, qualified persons to work in a particular organization employers always depend on proper and effective process (Munstemann, 2014). The effective process must follow specific stages and laid channels such as determining the current and future human resource requirement, identification the potential human resource pool and the competition (Corin & Bjork, 2016).

Most of online companies such Amazon faces a number of challenges during their employees’ recruitment process (Holm, 2014).Amazon an American E-commerce that started in 1994 is growing globally There are  primary factors that influence recruitment of workforce are such as economic factors, technological change, educational background, the lifestyle of workers, demographic changes and financial factors that influence the choice of the employees in the labor market and mobility ,analyzing and evaluating job to identify individual aspects that are suitable for creating jobs, determination of the organization ability to sustain the recruits and the documentation (de Chaves et al., 2017). However, the process in Amazon E-commerce faces the following challenges; high number of online applicants, undecided employees, demographic issues and unavailability of face-face communication during interview.

Many e-commerce organizations tend to hire individuals that are computer literate and software developers (Banerjee, 2016). Amazon is an internet-oriented company faces challenges of the overwhelming number of forwarded resumes. A large number of resumes tend to reduce the speed of short listing hence making the recruitment process to consume much longer time than expected. A large number of resumes tend to lock out some potential applicants such as those that demand confidentiality due to the inadequate screening process carried by some.  The discrimination and the long process tend to make Amazon loose potential candidates to competitors.

The constant changing economy makes most people look for more avenues to curb their economic crisis, making constant job changes that satisfy their needs hence making many employees to change jobs (Hallberg, 2011). The job unsatisfactory, forces continuous change of job, making the organizations to lose talented employees hence, calls for frequent recruitment process. Most of the employees will find a better paying job in the e-commerce organizations and may not feel contented due to a number of factors such geographical distances, the changing social life and the technological changes. These constant changes forces Amazon to offer extra cost on training the new recruits.

Undecided Employees

Research shows that there is an increase in the rate of the aging of the workforce and lack of leader’s development to take over the roles makes the recruitment to be more challenging(Madichie & Nyakang’o, 2016). In the Amazon Company, most of the leaders are of age between 25   years of age and above because they are the most considered as the digital group. The young age group does not provide enough leadership skills that might be needed due to inadequate work experience (Oude et al., 2016). As a result it is very difficult to get a candidate with both the qualifications on education and skills in the new technological issues to replace the old who are closing to their retirement age.

According to a survey, 60% job applicants, 13% tend to assume to make the online job opportunity making inadequate applicants pool for the companies to choose from (Ladkin & Buhalis, 2016). The study also observes that   most of the e-commerce companies also still embrace the face-to-face interview process, therefore making the process of online interview tiresome as most of the applicants will be required to go through face to face interview process.  Amazon Company making them faces a professional deficit (Banerjee, 2016). The company is confronted with a low level of qualified applicants for the announced vacancy. The high level of professional against the small market supply makes the recruitment a significant challenge as most of the picked staffs end up to be unskilled or unproductive that cause loss to the company at the end of the program. The untrained or the unproductive workers’ forces the company to go to extra miles of offering basic training that is costly.

For successful employee recruitment, Amazon E-Commerce has to consider a number of strategies. The following are Strategies that can be used by Amazon to address the challenges faced during the staff’s recruitment;

Employee retention is the ability of an organization to retain its employees through proper strategies to ensure that they stay for longer time (Bais, 2012). The employee retention helps the organizations from carrying out frequent recruitments hence avoids extra costs of training and the challenges that might be experienced (Parveen & Maimani, 2015). If the new recruit has knowledge and skills deficiency that are required to perform the specified job, then training is essential to upgrade their knowledge and expertise to the minimum level required. Studies indicate that there are all kinds of human capital obsolescence that occur in organizations and always lower the labor market participation and productivity of the same staffs (Baek & Cho, 2013). The unavailability of the recruit in the market might be due to some factors such as the large geographical area and the economic disadvantages forcing the human resource manager to land to the under skilled.

Demographic Issues

Due to the continuous changing technology in the globe, college recruitment is one of better ways of doing recruitment, development and retention for the new digital organizations (Collins, 2016). It is advantageous as the organization representative can screen the students and create a good technical applicant’s pool that is technologically oriented. The company should concentrate on recruiting the college students that offers internship programs that may provide the organization with quality employees at a low cost per hire.

According to research, concentrating on the employee development, training and motivation eventually increase the commitment and the production of the organization (Mikkelsen et al., 2015). A motivated employee tends to work hard, and to the best with satisfaction and may not opt of looking for another job opportunity since the working environment will be to their satisfaction. The employee’s retention though has become more heightened; it is the best way to save more employees the stress of losing the best-skilled staffs and going the importance of looking a replacement.

Before every firm does recruitment, proper job assessments should always be carried to help in identifying the skills and competencies required for the position (Wright, 2017). The process can always be time-consuming and expensive exercises as most of the small companies tend to concentrate on the formal qualifications. The process will impact the number of people that are available for a particular job and focus on the quality rather than quantity creating a natural ground on selecting the best candidate (Sawny & Ladkoo, 2015). The quality recruited staffs will not require much training and development hence Amazon E-Commerce will have a reduced cost on that.

The Amazon E-Commerce should use appropriate, legitimate search engines such as Google, Yahoo, HotBot, and GO.com that can sort out candidates actually without discriminating against any persons or groups(Suwala, 2013). The proper search engine will ensure that Amazon gets the full list of all applicants and screen them to get the proper list of the potential candidates that will not pose more cost on training and develop them after the appointment. The proper search engines and well developed video calls will protect help in conducting online interview that is personalized; hence the employees have better hand to select the best candidate for the job.

Studies show that branding attracts best talents in the labor supply since many people just long to work in such organization. As a result, there will be always a large pool of applicants that the company is ready to chose from incase of any need reducing the challenges faced during recruitment (Jarventie et al., 2011). Amazon being a new organization that is technologically oriented should aim at strengthening the brand and improving the culture that is comfortable with the society. Many diverse groups are still conservative in their ways of living even though there is constant technological growth, as many old and experienced managers are not well conversant with the social media platforms. It is therefore critical for Amazon to embrace and coach culture to attract the future to

Unavailability of Face-to-Face Communication

Conclusion

From the study, employees are the fundamental basics of an organization and proper selection will ensure continuity of the success. Many developing digital organizations such as Amazon, faces more recruitment challenges’ than other traditional forms of organizations such as Hospitality Industry due underdeveloped skills and knowledge among the workforce. The appointment of such employees poses the company to spend more money in conducting training. Some companies are experiencing constant growth of workers mainly because they have practiced the art of retention, motivation, awarding and promotion for a long-term stay of the workers; this saves them the stress of doing various recruitments. During the hiring, the human and resource department should take the process carefully, and should always determine whether to do it internally or externally, where the internal recruitment overrides the external due to the already built technological know-how, skills, and the organizational culture. Through that, Amazon and many others will cut down the cost of training.

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