Nikol Szymul staffs a reception desk at Amazon offices discretely tucked into a building called Fiona in downtown Seattle, Washington on May 11, 2017.
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Amazon announced Tuesday it has hired 1,000 employees at its Nashville, Tennessee, office.
The milestone means Amazon is “ahead of schedule” in its efforts to bring 5,000 jobs to the area, said Dave Clark, Amazon’s senior vice president of retail operations, in a release. Amazon hasn’t provided a time frame for when it expects to fulfill all of its promised 5,000 jobs in Nashville.
Amazon’s Nashville office, located just north of the city’s The Gulch neighborhood, serves as its East Coast operations hub, overseeing the tech and management functions of its retail operations. The company tapped Nashville as its new logistics hub nearly two years ago when it chose Northern Virginia as the site of its second headquarters, known as HQ2.
As part of its HQ2 nationwide search, Amazon originally planned to split its second headquarters between Arlington, Virginia, and New York City’s Long Island City neighborhood in Queens. It later withdrew its proposal in New York due to pushback from local activists and city council leaders.
Amazon said it has hired locally as well as attracted employees from outside the city to work out of its Nashville office, dubbed the Operations Center of Excellence. “Our teams here are already inventing new ways we can use technology to help keep our employees safe and continue serving our customers during this pandemic,” Clark said in the release.
Amazon also touted its job creation across the state of Tennessee, saying it has created 12,700 “indirect jobs” in a number of industries, including construction, logistics and professional services, among others. The company operates at least four fulfillment centers in Tennessee and has other planned warehouse locations in the state, according to MWPVL International, a supply chain and logistics consulting firm. Amazon fulfillment centers typically employ thousands of people, though the number varies from location to location.
