College graduates get your resumes ready. Microsoft announced Friday that it will be hiring 6,000 to 7,000 workers over a 1 year span. Hopefully other companies will start to offer more jobs like Microsoft. Still I have to wonder why Microsoft has suddenly started to hire so many people. Could it be that these new jobs are needed to get Longhorn out the door quicker, or is Microsoft trying to jump start the technology industry?
Microsoft expects to hire roughly 6,000 to 7,000 workers over the next 12 months, the company said Friday, though it is unclear how many of those hires will be filling new posts.
The company said about 3,000 of the hires are expected to be in the Seattle area, but a representative said the company doesn"t know how many of the recruits will be for new jobs and how many will fill vacancies created through attrition. "With more than 28,000 of our 57,000 worldwide employees working at locations throughout the Puget Sound, we remain very committed to the region," a Microsoft representative said in an e-mail.
In its just-completed fiscal year, Microsoft said, it hired 4,000 to 5,000 people and ended the year with 57,086 employees, up from 54,923 a year earlier. That marked a gain of a little more than 2,000 workers, with about half that growth in the United States and about half overseas.