By Laura Stevens and Shayndi Raice 

This article is being republished as part of our daily reproduction of WSJ.com articles that also appeared in the U.S. print edition of The Wall Street Journal (December 14, 2018).

Amazon.com Inc.'s announcement that it will bring 25,000 new jobs to both New York City and Northern Virginia has sparked a frenzy of local activity. Condos are flying off the market. City leaders are fighting over tax incentives. Businesses are already preparing for a rush of new customers.

Lost in all the commotion: It will likely take many years, if not a decade, before residents see a massive army of Amazon employees invading their cities.

That is because Amazon plans to slowly hire workers rather than overwhelm its new hosts all at once. Amazon has told employees at its Seattle headquarters it won't require them to relocate, said people familiar with the matter, meaning it will rely on mostly local hires.

By the end of next year, it projects adding 400 employees in Arlington, Va.'s Crystal City neighborhood just outside of Washington, D.C. Amazon expects to only have reached half of its 25,000 target seven years later. In New York's Long Island City neighborhood, it plans to add 700 employees next year and hit 25,000 by 2028. Those projections assume Amazon will continue its rapid growth.

Before workers can move in, Amazon needs to remodel temporary offices it is leasing in Long Island City and Crystal City, which will take several months. Amazon already has plenty of office space in both metro areas, so it won't need to rush construction, these people said. It could take roughly two years before Amazon is able to break ground on its new New York campus, and potentially a little sooner for Northern Virginia, due to various needed site approvals and other preconstruction work.

"It's a multiyear process," said Jeff Forsythe, a site selection expert with Forsythe & Associates Inc. who isn't involved in Amazon's projects. Building a major new office space typically takes one to two years, but Amazon is hiring more people than usual, he said. "A lot of stuff can happen between now and when they're supposed to complete this project."

Amazon announced its search for a second, equal headquarters more than a year ago, saying it planned to hire 50,000 employees and invest $5 billion over nearly two decades. The company received applications from 238 locations and then narrowed its list to 20 finalists.

Although Amazon said when it announced HQ2 that no one would be forced to move, some executives still worried they might be forced to relocate to a city they didn't want to live in, according to some of the people familiar with the matter. Amazon said managers would be able to select where their teams were located, as well as if they would be split between locations.

Amazon officials decided in September that it would need two sites to hire enough people to support growth. In November, when The Wall Street Journal reported the company's decision to split HQ2 rather than create just one "full equal," many executives were relieved because they thought it lessened the pressure for Amazon to move teams across the country, according to some of the people.

It isn't exactly clear how Amazon will maintain company cohesion among three megasites. Internally, Amazon maintains that it will run the two new offices like its Seattle corporate headquarters, eventually housing top executives and major divisions at each location, while holding board meetings and all-hands gatherings to signify the locations' importance, some of the people said. Amazon Chief Executive Jeff Bezos is also expected to spend significant time at all three locations. The changes will happen slowly, the people cautioned.

Some hires who would have previously started in Seattle will now have the option to start in and lead teams from the new locations, some of the people said.

The new campuses in Long Island City and what Northern Virginia is calling "National Landing" are expected to accommodate a variety of workers, from high-tech jobs such as software engineers and professional roles like media relations, to administrative positions. Amazon has promised salaries will average more than $150,000, yielding rich rewards from the cities and states. Those incentives are based on Amazon hiring a specific number of people according to predetermined timelines.

The hiring pace hinges on Amazon's ability to keep up its rapid growth. For a company that is over two decades old, that growth is far from certain. Amazon is facing stronger competition globally, as well as regulatory pushback as politicians in the U.S. and abroad question its size and influence.

In Seattle, Amazon's employment has grown from 5,000 workers in 2010 to more than 45,000. It also has 18 tech hubs employing a total of more than 20,000 workers across North America. The San Francisco Bay Area is its largest hub outside Seattle, with more than 6,000 workers, and more than half of those are in Sunnyvale, Calif. Over 4,000 Amazon employees already work in New York.

Amazon employs more than 600,000 workers world-wide, mostly in its warehouses. It has roughly 22,000 jobs open around the world, according to its job site. More than 6,000 of those positions are in software development.

Write to Laura Stevens at laura.stevens@wsj.com and Shayndi Raice at shayndi.raice@wsj.com

 

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

December 14, 2018 02:47 ET (07:47 GMT)

Copyright (c) 2018 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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