BENTONVILLE, AK - Retail giant Walmart is doubling down on its commitment to tech, with plans to hire 2,000 technology workers in 2019 to bolster its e-commerce business and in-store innovations. Whether it’s the robots scrubbing floors or the apps for online ordering, it will be exciting to see what tech innovations result from the hirings in the coming year.
All of the current positions will be a part of the Walmart Labs division, a division that is responsible for almost all of the company’s technological innovations that enhance the customer experience online and in stores. Included in Walmart Labs’ function are "any technical capabilities that power our stores, website, or app," said a Walmart spokesman, as reported by Northwest Arkansas’ Democrat Gazette.
Headed by Jeremy King, Chief Technology Officer, Walmart labs currently employs about 7,500 people, after a mass hiring last year of 1,700 people. The source reported that more personnel are needed, however, including software engineers, data scientists, designers, project managers, and other “technologists.”
In addition to these positions, the company is also looking for a Chief Executive Officer for a “stealth company,” a new startup in the company’s Silicon Valley tech incubator, Store No. 8. The source said that job duties for this position include “building a business from scratch,” working alongside the company’s senior executives, and also serving as a “public champion” for the business. The ability to handle competitive threats is a key skill listed in the job posting.
New jobs will be partly filled by current employees who desire to learn about the technological side of retailing, and partly by tech workers from outside the company, said Cameron Smith, Founder of an Arizona-based executive recruiting firm. "Finding these workers on both sides will involve heavy communications on exposing its internal and external labor pool to the amazing things that Walmart is doing with data," he commented.
With much of the company’s outside recruiting taking place on university campuses, Walmart plans to bring its story of growth into the future. Its fast expansion in the 1990s resulted from the company’s strong emphasis on its grocery line, with the supercenter concept, and mastery of data, said Smith.
"They gave away data to suppliers to run their businesses effectively," Smith noted, adding that targeting a younger hiring pool brings its own set of challenges. He suggested that the company should change the narrative, to step away from thinking of Walmart only as stores, in an effort to compete for top talent with companies like Google.
The new positions are to be spread across Walmart Labs’ nine locations, which are Bentonville AK; San Bruno, Sunnyvale, and Carlsbad in California; Portland, OR; Reston, VA; Hoboken, NJ; Dublin, Ireland; and Bangalore, India. Some of these locations are more desirable than others, and Smith admitted it can be difficult to convince professionals from other parts of the country, or world, to move to Bentonville, AK. However, he believes that after professionals arrive in Northwest Arkansas for their first visit, "the region sells itself and most of them never leave."
AndNowUKnow will keep you up to date on the goings-on of the Walmart tech division.
