Why Amazon’s recruitment team believes it can conquer Europe
Monopoly sets. Anti-squirrel bird feeders. Cuddly toys. DVDs. Epsom salts. A pirate fancy dress costume. Nail varnish. Whatever you could possibly want, one of Amazon’s 10 UK fulfilment centres probably has it, all stocked in an improbable order that makes sense only to secret algorithms. Walking down the rows and rows of items, it’s impossible not to build a wish list in your head.
But Georgina Yellowlees, Amazon’s head of talent for Europe, is building a different type of wish list: of people who have the right qualities to staff the firm’s two new fulfilment centres, which will open in Manchester and Leicestershire this autumn. These will create 1,500 permanent roles over the next three years, ranging from operations and HR managers to engineers.
Keeping pace with the company’s rapid growth is her biggest priority – she oversees recruitment for Amazon’s operations, logistics, customer service, Prime Now and Pantry divisions, at all seniority levels, across Europe. “The growth is phenomenal,” says Luxembourg-based Yellowlees, who joined Amazon in 2012 in its executive recruitment division and took on her current role in December 2014. “When I inherited the team, the projections were to hire 1,800 managers across Europe. Last year we actually recruited more than 2,900. And this year we’re projecting to hire more than 4,000 managers.”
Supporting Yellowlees’ mission to ramp up recruitment is her 140-strong, pan-European team of in-house recruiters. “Previously, the structure was based around countries,” she says. “But as we’re looking for candidates with similar profiles across Europe, I wanted to make it functionally aligned.” Now one team, for example, focuses on supply chain activities and another on transportation roles across markets including the UK, France, Spain, Germany and the Czech Republic.
Yellowlees has a strong belief in the value of her in-house team, which could partly be in response to the public scrutiny Amazon has faced over its reliance on agency workers to staff its warehouses, and a New York Times exposé of its management practices, which CEO Jeff Bezos has disputed.
“We get a stronger return on investment because the recruiters we hire know Amazon inside out,” she says. “I also think candidates like to speak with someone who’s actually working in Amazon, and can tell them the honest truth. We’re a very visible and honest recruitment organisation. We’d never want anyone to join under false pretences: I expect my recruiters to tell candidates what a day in the life of Amazon would really be like.”
While the functional teams focus on determining the most effective recruitment channels and which strategic business priorities to focus on, Yellowlees says she is “constantly looking at strategy and what we can do to become more productive. What can we do around process optimisation, so the customer or candidate is getting the best possible experience? I’m always questioning what we can do better than we are today.”
Yellowlees’ quest for continuous improvement chimes with the organisation’s culture of relentlessly pushing forward – which in turn has influenced the profile of candidates it is trying to reach. Simply put, “we need highly intelligent people who want to get stuff done”, she says. Rather than seeking people with specific skillsets, Amazon is looking at “graduates who can learn and develop and, at more experienced levels, people who are looking to change career; for example, someone from a military background who wants to start a career in finance. It’s about finding people who have highly analytical profiles, and who are interested, curious and willing to be malleable about what kind of role they fall into,” says Yellowlees.
Ambiguity is the norm at Amazon, she explains. “You need a lot of agility in the way you think and how you can strategise at the more senior level. We’re constantly having to be flexible and think outside the box. It’s an environment where you can’t be used to having a structure; in everything you do, you have to constantly push the boundaries, innovate and think big. In the end, you will find a solution.”
So how has this changed the definition of a top-class recruiter? “Today it’s all about business partnership,” says Yellowlees. “Amazon used to be able to rely on direct applications coming in, but we can’t do that anymore. Now we need recruiters who understand the organisation’s health, where its talent succession is coming from and how to partner with the business. It’s a much more commercial role than previously.”
And this isn’t just an ‘Amazon’ thing, she says. “Businesses don’t want a recruitment partner who is just filling vacancies – they want someone who understands their business, can be a partner and can help them on that talent journey. I think talent’s become so important to companies, whereas before it was just a resource. Now it’s the heartbeat of the organisation. The people we recruit now will determine the future of the company.”
Because talent is so vital to organisational success, and Amazon is inherently a data-driven company, Yellowlees says she’s had to learn to talk the business’s language of metrics. “The only way I can have informed discussions with the ops team is by having the data to back it up,” she says. “They want to know my productivity rates, where and what my bottlenecks are. Being able to translate into their language how talent affects them is how you gain credibility.” Key metrics currently include time to fill and time to hire, dwell times in pipelines and decline rates. “Pretty much any potential KPI you could have in the talent management space,” she says.
With Amazon seemingly launching a new division every few months, it’s difficult for Yellowlees to forecast her vision for recruitment over the next three to five years. “I think it’s going to be about building a scalable recruitment organisation that is seen as world class when it comes to the obsession it places on the customer, the hiring manager and the experience we both get. We aren’t just putting butts on seats here: we’re changing someone’s whole career.”