As HR chief for Amazon—and its 647,000-plus employees—Beth Galetti '93 has "presided over a hiring spree of historic proportions," according to Fast Company, which featured the electrical engineering alumna in its May 2019 issue.
The story credits Galetti's engineering and technology industry background with helping her succeed, despite coming into the role with no prior HR experience.
“If we’re going to hire tens of thousands—or now hundreds of thousands—of people a year, we can’t afford to live by manual processes and manual transactions,” she says.
Galetti, a native of Baltimore, the child of an engineer and an investment banker, and "a math prodigy who entered Lehigh University at age 16," says her work focuses on making it easier for Amazon employees to do meaningful work.
“I’m looking for ways to remove the barriers, fix the defects, and enable self-service,” she says.
That goal, the article reports, has resulted in a surge of hiring of its own, with Amazon having "a startling 600 people working on internal software for purposes such as onboarding new recruits and conducting reviews, all of whom are part of Galetti’s HR department rather than some engineering group elsewhere in the organization."
Read more about Galetti and Amazon's unconventional match, which, according to the article, is "the result of synchronicity—and the company’s instinctive love of contrarian gambits," on Fast Company's website.
