Jobs, jobs, jobs. It’s ‘go time’ for Amazon to hire 1,000 Tri-Cities warehouse workers

Amazon Inc. will start filling one of its Pasco warehouses with employees when its job website goes live on Friday.

The Seattle e-commerce giant will post 150-300 jobs on June 14 and will keep posting every Friday until it reaches its goal of 1,000 workers for the facility set to open this summer near Sacajawea State Park.

Derick Logan, a hiring official, kicked off the formal hiring process Monday with a meeting organized by WorkSource Columbia Basin.

The Washington state employment office will offer extended hours to help job seekers who don’t have reliable internet access.

Logan advised prospective employees to use the company’s hiring site, amazon.com/flexiblejobs, and not a third party employment service.

Local jobs will begin appearing in the search results for Pasco, WA in the afternoon or evening on Friday. Job seekers should check between 6 p.m. and 10 p.m., he said.

Pasco jobs will start at $18.50 an hour.

Employees qualify for company-sponsored health, vision and dental benefits on their first day. They may also request paychecks at the end of any shift they work.

He described a hiring process that’s meant to bring a diverse group of workers to the company by eliminating the kinds of barriers that prevent the most at-risk people from seeking jobs.

The hiring begins three years after Amazon built the two massive warehouses. The company has never confirmed if or when it will open the second building, called Project Oyster, on the west side of South Road 40 East.

In a related move, it is building a 90,000-square-foot delivery station near the King City truck stop in Pasco to accommodate two-day deliveries in the Tri-Cities.

The delivery station will add 150 more people to Amazon’s local headcount, the company has said.

The latest hiring event will focus on entry-level positions. Amazon previously filled management posts after advertising for upper level jobs in March.

Amazon job requirements

It does not require a high school or equivalent degree and does not ask applicants to submit resumes or participate in interviews. It does not test for cannabis.

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Logan stressed that Amazon is doubly committed to employing people with disabilities, who have served in the military and who arrived in the U.S. as refugees.

Applicants who complete the process and choose which days and shifts they want are all but assured that the job will wait for them.

“If they apply, the job is locked in,” he said.

Most of the jobs in Pasco will be entry-level warehouse posts. Once on the payroll, Amazon employees are eligible to take advantage of training and education offerings to advance their careers.

Logan said the warehouse will employ about 1,000, swelling by about a third during the peak holiday season.

Most jobs will be full-time, with four 10-hour shifts and three day weekends.

There will be some part-time postings, less than full-time positions and seasonal positions.

Amazon previously said it would employ 1,500 in Pasco when it opened an “inbound cross dock.”

A spokeswoman reaffirmed that it will open as a dock that accepts incoming merchandise rather than as a fulfillment center, which prepares products to ship to customers.

2021 top business story

Regardless, it is an enormously important moment for Pasco, Amazon and local economic development officials.

Amazon stunned the Tri-Cities in late 2021, when it confirmed it was building two massive fulfillment centers on South Road 40 east, near Sacajawea State Park. It was the biggest business story of the year.

The buildings, each with 1.1 million square feet, were expected to employ more than 1,200 people in combination with each other.

By 2022, however, the plans had faltered. Amazon paused a building spree that doubled its logistics footprint, leaving the Pasco warehouses idle and collecting tumbleweeds in their fences.

It revived in February, when Amazon disclosed it had a new plan for Pasco’s “Project Oyster,” the code name for the building on the east side of the road, 1351 S. Road 40 E.

That building would become an inbound cross dock to accept incoming shipments so they could be broken down and fed into the complex distribution center.

Amazon and its development partner, Ryan Companies US Inc., spent $10 million to alter the security systems and the racking systems to support the unused building’s new mission.

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