Amazon is making significant changes to its careers website, changes that are about a year in the making. It’s also launching a short online game, built by TMP, to rev up interest in the new site pages.
Some of these updates are going into effect over the next few days, and other changes are likely coming around the end of Q1.
With the previous Amazon career site (at right), a candidate found themselves on pages that felt similar to product pages.
The old site reflected the decentralized nature of Amazon. If a user came in through the Brazil marketplace, they might have a different experience than if they came in through the India marketplace, and that experience could be better or worse than the India marketplace job seeker.
The bottom line: there wasn’t one great, global place to find out about jobs at Amazon.
The new site was built with a company called CKR Interactive, out of Campbell, California. (When CKR got the contract, it was a very big win for the firm, beating a long list of competitors that was like a “who’s who” of recruiting ad agencies). The new site features videos, prominent graphics about the quantity and types of jobs available, as well as a section on the “faces of Amazon.” There’s also a link to a new little game — more on that in a minute.
Work-from-home jobs are featured a bit more prominently than I’ve seen on most sites. The company’s location, Seattle, gets more play than a HQ gets on many career sites.
On top of that, Amazon has spent a lot of time on the search process, and is still working on it.
With regard to search: like many other career sites, you can search by job category, like legal, HR, or software development.
But, different than some corporate websites, it’s also breaking jobs down by team categories, and within that, teams. An example of a “team category” is the fulfillment division you’ve read about; there are also team categories for Amazon Web Services, Kindle, digital entertainment, retail, and more.
Now, within those team categories are teams. So the retail team might have a baby section as well as a mom section. In all, there are more than 100 teams, and more on the way.
CKR calls these various search options “multifacted search,” a phrase it used when it put together the proposal for Amazon.
As I mentioned at the outset, Amazon is still working on all this. This initial rollout is going on this week (so depending on when you click over to Amazon, you may still see the old site; check out amazon.jobs to look at the new version). And after this week’s rollout, there’ll be more functionality on both the back and front ends of the site.
On the back end, each team appears likely to have control over their team pages. If an advertising team or a Kindle team wants to add a new page of content, it should be able to.
This means the process of writing job descriptions and adding content to the Amazon site apparently will spread over a variety of recruiters, operating in different departments and locations.
As for the front-end search, I expect in a couple months or so to see more tools for candidates to manage their searches and applications, particularly for so-called passive candidates who either don’t see a job open at the moment or who aren’t dying for one right now.
To go along with the launch, TMP — a different agency than the one that helped with the careers site — built a game for Amazon. Like some sites I’ve mentioned recently, such as Bloomie’s or Geneca, the game “responds” to mobile devices, desktops, tablets, and as a Facebook app.
The quiz involves 20 questions about the company’s new careers site. Each of the 20 answers are words that represent some aspect of Amazon as a company or an employer. You’re given photos — and hints, if you don’t mind losing points — aimed at having you guess a word, such as “retail” or “growth.” With each word/concept, you can click on a “learn more” to go to a page of the careers site with more information on the topic.