"This past year has seen a particularly competitive labor market and in doing a thorough analysis of various options, weighing the economics of our business and the need to remain competitive for attracting and retaining top talent, we decided to make meaningfully bigger increases to our compensation levels than we do in a typical year," the company said in the internal post. Amazon is currently in the middle of its annual performance evaluation process, known internally as "Forte." It's the first review cycle since Andy Jassy became Amazon CEO last year, succeeding founder Jeff Bezos.