Amazon freezes advertising business hiring levels

Amazon.com Inc. is freezing staffing levels in its profitable advertising business, indicating that the world’s largest e-commerce firm is taking more drastic measures to align costs with slowing sales.

The headcount freeze was announced internally on Tuesday. Amazon will continue to fill vacancies in its advertising business, but will not create any new, according to sources.

However, Amazon’s spokesperson in a statement said Amazon continued to have a significant number of open roles available across the company. They added the company had many different businesses at various stages of evolution, and the company expects to keep adjusting its hiring strategies in each of these businesses at several junctions.

The decision to keep the advertising unit workforce at its current level shows Amazon is looking to squeeze more profit out of the fast-growing business in the busy holiday season. Last week in a media call, Amazon’s Chief Financial Officer Brian Olsavsky said that Amazon would continue to invest in its advertising division and Amazon Web Services, its cloud-computing unit, while looking for other places to reduce costs.

Amazon’s advertising business—largely sponsored search results on its web store—generated $9.95 billion in the quarter ended September 30, 2022, an increase of 25% from the same period a year earlier.