With a stock price that has increased 135 percent over the last five years, Home Depot remains one of the few giant brick-and-mortar retailers to find success in the age of Amazon.
Now, the $200 billion home improvement retailer is going on the biggest technology hiring spree in its history to try to maintain that edge.
Home Depot plans to add more than 1,000 new hires to its technology teams in 2018, the company will announce on Wednesday, to support an $11 billion multi-year investment plan to extend its lead in brick-and-mortar retail over competitors like Lowe’s and fend off increased competition from Amazon and other online players. The company has approximately 2,800 employees in technology roles today.
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The hires will span roles such as software engineering, user experience design, network engineering and product management, and be located predominately in the company’s Atlanta, Austin and Dallas technology offices, the company said.
They mark the onset of an $11.1 billion strategic plan, first announced in December, designed to improve Home Depot’s online shopping experience, expand its warehouse footprint to speed up deliveries, and make improvements to its stores to help customers find items quicker and check out faster. Recode reported in December that Home Depot had weighed an acquisition bid for the $9 billion logistics company XPO to beef up its shipping and delivery capabilities.
Matt Carey, Home Depot’s chief information officer, acknowledged in an interview that the hiring numbers might not compare to those of the leader in U.S. online retail, Amazon. But they mark an increase of more than a third for Home Depot’s technology staff, and Carey said he’s confident the company’s current plan is a differentiated one.
“I don’t run their roadmap; I run my roadmap,” he said of Amazon in an interview with Recode. “The roadmap we have is one our customers are encouraging us to go execute on. I’m not limited by anything other than time right now.”
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