Saving Workforce Acquisition Costs by 90% Using AWS with Amazon Intelligent Talent Acquisition

The Amazon WFS team supports the hiring of hourly employees at operations facilities, encompassing marketing, analytics, communication, staffing, and vendor management in several countries. With millions of customers, Amazon WFS hires hourly employees across thousands of locations around the world every week. These locations may need anywhere from a handful of teammates to hundreds of people on staff during any given week, and these needs change fluidly based on customer demand.

The team needed to streamline its hiring and optimize recruitment marketing to be more effective and cost-efficient. “To scale and continue meeting the demands of the business, Amazon WFS has been prioritizing the improvement of fill rates across thousands of Amazon sites and sustainably reducing the cost of hiring globally,” says Troy Winters, vice president for global workforce staffing at Amazon.

Amazon WFS worked with Amazon ITA to focus its marketing on the prospects most likely to lead to hires and to improve the efficiency of marketing campaigns. As a result, it reduced its workforce marketing spend by more than 90 percent in 2 years—a savings of over 1 billion dollars. The key building blocks were centralizing data, creating system-driven inspections, and using ML models for optimization. The team implemented automated systems that activate and deactivate marketing campaigns only when required, attracting candidates with a high probability to convert while reducing less suitable leads early on. These systems now efficiently manage the Amazon WFS recruitment funnel, maintaining a steady flow of qualified candidates without unnecessary spending.

The Amazon ITA solution is comprised of three components: it uses advanced analytics to evaluate hiring opportunities, analyzes historical data to predict future trends and determine the optimal number of job applications needed to fulfill demand, and stores data from multiple sources on Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), an object storage service built to retrieve any amount of data from anywhere.

To measure the incremental impact of the team’s marketing investments, data is connected from multiple sources—including the marketing recommendations optimizer—and the ML model for the proprietary marketing mix runs on Amazon SageMaker, a fully managed ML service that provides tools and infrastructure to build, train, and deploy ML models at scale.

Finally, the application quality controller continuously monitors and dynamically adjusts job posting activities based on findings from the ML models. “The ML models take into account factors such as anticipated order volumes, shift schedules, and weather impacts to provide Amazon WFS with reliable, up-to-the-minute staffing plans,” says Ashish Parulekar, director of data science and global head of intelligent talent acquisition at Amazon.

Overall, this strategy has enhanced both the impact and the efficiency of the recruitment process. The team can view the effectiveness with which marketing across different channels, such as job boards and social media, reaches prospective candidates. With insights from ML models along with Amazon QuickSight, a unified business intelligence service, Amazon WFS can focus on the most effective sources. “The seamless connection between AWS services—from Amazon SageMaker for advanced analytics to Amazon QuickSight for centralized reporting—empowers the Amazon WFS team to make data-driven decisions,” says Sandeep Arora, Director, Product, ITA Global

Altogether, the system analyzes candidate application rates, forecasts hiring needs, and generates insights based on multiple factors to meet the demand for people and maintain a good candidate experience. “By using these AWS-powered solutions, we have the tools and insights to optimize workforce planning and talent acquisition strategy for the real world,” says Arora. “From evaluating marketing opportunities to measuring investment impact and maintaining the optimal balance between labor supply and demand, the Amazon ITA solution facilitates effective decision-making and operational efficiency.”

The Amazon ITA team is scaling its solution to support the company’s hiring needs in other regions, starting with Europe. It plans to launch these tools in at least three more countries in 2025.

“The success of the Amazon ITA platform has solidified the team’s conviction that data and technology will continue to drive the most innovative and impactful solutions in the years to come,” says Parulekar. “Using AWS, the Amazon ITA team is excited to push the boundaries of intelligent talent acquisition.”