Amazon has announced it is hiring 5,500 employees in North Carolina to work through the holiday season. More than 3,000 employees will be hired across the Charlotte Region.
In a news release, an Amazon spokesperson said that number is part of 150,000 open full-time, seasonal and part-time roles. Those roles range from packing and picking to sorting and shipping.
The average wage for the positions is more than $19 per hour, plus benefits. Some new hires will also qualify for signing bonuses of up to $1,000.
Amazon plans to offer pathways for many of the hires to become full-time employees after the holiday season.
We value our seasonal employees at Amazon by offering well-paying jobs with a variety of schedules,” Nariq Jones, a Human Resources leader at Amazon’s fulfillment center in Garner, North Carolina, said. “As demand ramps up, these employees play an important role by making sure we’re delivering packages and smiles to our customers throughout the 2022 holiday season.”
According to Business Insider, a new report from Indeed Hiring Lab suggests more people are considering a seasonal job compared to last year or even 2020 according to search data. The report says that “at the end of September 2022, the share of seasonal job searches on Indeed was up 33% from the same period in 2021 and 13% over 2020,” although that share is still lower than it was in 2019.
Despite an eagerness for holiday work, economists from various career sites agree that seasonal hiring might be a bit cooler than anticipated, Business Insider reports.
“In recent years, U.S. employers have typically added between 3.5-4 million jobs to their payrolls as they staff up for the holiday season,” Aaron Terrazas, chief economist at Glassdoor, said in a statement to Business Insider. “The holiday outlook is distinctly less cheery this year amid a challenging macroeconomic climate.”
Cory Stahle, an Indeed economist and author of the new report, described the holiday hiring season as “cooler than last year, but it still remains strong.” Stahle added, “there’s still plenty of opportunities out there that we’re seeing.”
