Jobs: the perennial trending topic. If you want votes, promise jobs. If you want readers, report that robots are stealing jobs. If you’re successful in business, create jobs. If you have bills, get jobs. If you’re Apple, venerate Jobs. Okay, now that we’ve totally overdone our keyword density (that’s an SEO joke, haha, just smile and nod)… Today on Money Radio, we talked about the changing job market and discussed how one company figured out how to pay its employees during a huge setback.

Amazon Hiring Spree Creates 50K Warehouse Jobs

If you’ve been to the mall lately, chances are you’ve seen a lot of vacant retail space. The reality of digital commerce bites for brick and mortar stores. It’s been years since Borders bit the dust, and Barnes & Noble had to wise up by competing with Amazon or else close its heavy wood-framed doors. Department stores, once reliable shopping center anchors, are closing locations at an alarming pace.

As Tony Stark puts it, you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is at least as rich as Tony Stark. His company has broken a lot of eggs, and the question is will they make enough omelets to revitalize the economy they disrupted?

• Thousands of job seekers certainly hope so. On August 2nd, lines of hundreds of people stretched around more than a dozen locations to attend Amazon’s job fair. Amazon is offering competitive wages and benefits to warehouse employees and plans to add 100k jobs by the middle of 2018.
• Most of the jobs are full-time, include health insurance, and offer opportunities for advancement.
• Employers near warehouses need to offer jobs that can compete with Amazon. Though this could be costly, it could also drive up business by increasing purchasing power.
• If you haven’t moved at least some of your operations to an e-commerce model yet, it’s a good idea to do it yesterday! Which brings us to:

Retail Jobs, Meet Software Workforce

Glassdoor recently released a report with data showing which industries lead in software job postings. Retail came in first, with a 7.5% increase in the overall share of software job postings. Retail businesses account for nearly 15% of software job listings – that’s more than the IT and Internet and Tech categories combined! Researchers credit online retailers like Amazon and Walmart for the surge in these listings. For aspiring software engineers, computer scientists and other techies, there’s no shortage of positions in general computing, aerospace and defense contracting, or IT. There is, however, an increase in the types of companies jockeying for your talent. On a similar vein, you have options besides Silicon Valley if you want a great software career — like Phoenix, for example.

Snopes and the Bad Digital Marketing Contractor

We talk about reputation monitoring for your business, and we hope this inspires you to look into the reputation of companies you contract with. According to the Arizona Republic, a former contractor is holding Snopes hostage by cutting it off from ad revenue. Snopes has long served Internet users seeking a reliable BS detector for urban legends, wild rumors, and alternative facts. Now, the vendor in charge of the site won’t relinquish access, even though the contract has ended. Ouch!

The story does have a happy ending: Supporters around the world have contributed well over $500k to a GoFundMe campaign to cover the website’s operational costs and legal fees while the court battle proceeds. The free Internet is a beautiful thing! As digital marketing partners, when you give us access to your online assets, we understand this requires a huge amount of trust. While contracts offer legally binding protection, you can’t underestimate the value of trustworthy vendors who honor the terms as a basic ethical standard.

As Google Partners, we take our core value of Trust seriously. Learn what our clients say about us, and get in touch.

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