Amazon reviews

High performance culture and can get lost in the large organisation

First of all, Amazon recruiters will give you a very inaccurate, over-glossed, rosy picture of HR opportunities at an Amazon Fulfillment Center (FC). They will almost resort to sleazy, car salesman types of tactics to sell you the job. It is very common for experienced HR professionals to come here and share their sentiment of complete shock and awe upon realizing what the true day-to-day job entails. For many of these individuals, the decision to take the position quickly becomes a regret and a mistake. The real day-to-day ground zero experience for HR at an Amazon FC is highly dysfunctional, disorganized, chaotic, and surprisingly embryonic. This is not what constitutes work for the field of HR. Forget strategic HR business partnership, this doesn't exist in the slightest and the company has a long road before HR at Amazon FCs can reach that state. HR at Amazon FCs is purely transactional, secretarial, administrative, low-scope, and demeaning. HR Assistants are doing administrative assistant work, HR Business Partners are doing HR Assistant work, HR Managers are doing HR Generalist and HR Assistant work, and so on. Your time is spent here putting out fires and reacting. There is also a very high volume of low-scope investigation and employee relations issues work. Also, be ready to get buried in hundreds of emails per day and thousands of emails per week. This is not an exaggeration. I barely see any hint of work that is planful or proactive. Then on top of this, when there are widespread performance problems from other members of the HR team, it exacerbates this condition even more. I question some of the hiring decisions that are made and some of these entry-level HR Assistants that are brought on. It is not uncommon to find yourself surrounded by an excessive degree of professional immaturity. It is not easy to formally address performance and carry out performance management for problem-performing HR team members due to lack of support from leadership. This ties in to the culture overall at Amazon FCs that is too employee-friendly leaving around long leashes instead of placing firm accountability for someone’s performance. I also question the true effectiveness of some of the senior HR leaders in the Amazon FC HR world. There is a high amount of volatility and instability for HR teams at Amazon FCs. New buildings are opening up without the main HR leader position being filled which leads to a lot of other downstream consequences. There is an extremely high amount of negative turnover amongst HRBPs and HRAs (as high as 50% or more). Many who join leave within the first year. The repeated job postings that you see posted that seem to be on an “evergreen” state is not all due to growth and the addition of new positions, a lot of this is to backfill and to recoup from all the turnover that exists. The strong individuals leave on their own volition yet the problem performers stick around for too long. With these conditions, it is truly difficult for one to be set up for success here as an HR professional. The recruiters do a very poor job of presenting a more balanced picture of the job. Work schedules for HR professionals at Amazon FCs are also not a positive point to highlight. You do get made aware that the HR operation is “24/7” and that you aren’t going to be working the traditional M-F 8-5 job but there are still nuances of work schedule requirements that leaves you feeling imprisoned. You almost feel like you are working an hourly, mall job and are stuck in a specific work schedule without a lot of the flexibility and latitude that you would see for other senior-level HR positions. The company is always in reactive mode so there are a lot of last-minute decisions that get made which affect your work schedule and thereby affect your personal life. Also know that during the Peak season, you will be working a 6x10 schedule in HR doing the low-scope work I described above. This does not get shared with you from the recruiters. What also doesn’t get shared from the recruiters is that you may start out on one specific work schedule (i.e. Days) but it’s common that HR team members will rotate through schedules 1-2x per year so even though you start on Days, you may be on Nights before the year is over. The recruiter didn’t share that variability up front. I also noticed concerns with the leadership culture at Amazon. The Leadership Principles seem to exist in theory only but not applied in the real world. Many managers tend to be aloof and do not know what it’s really like to develop a true, meaningful work partnership. It is not uncommon to walk by another manager and not receive the slightest hint of acknowledgement, any eye contact, the slightest smile, or a “hi, how are you?”. There is a lot of this type of aloofness going around in multiple buildings. I question the excessive degree to which the organization is employee-friendly as it puts a damper on management being able to effectively run operations and leads to entitled, untactful employees running the show. Don’t be fooled by the glossy picture painted by the recruiters and the shiny job offer package with high compensation, generous sign-on bonus, and unprecedented stock options. It’s just the strategy to attract and retain talent but then you get in and see how things really are. Think long and hard about your decision before it becomes a decision that you may likely regret significantly after.