Amazon added more than 76,000 people last year

Amazon added 76,700 employees in 2015, an increase of 50% from the previous year, according to the company's latest annual filing.

That's way more employees than it's added in each of the last three years, and is also the fastest rate of employee growth since 2012, when the company grew employees 57%.

That brings the company to about 230,800 employees total. What are all those people doing?

Probably working in the company's warehouses for the most part. Amazon actually didn't talk about employment growth per se on its earnings call yesterday (transcript here), but CFO Brian Olsavsky did note that the company had added 14 fulfillment centers, for a total of 123, and 4 sortation centers, for a total of 23 during the year.

A lot of those employees were added during the first three quarters of the year - at the end of Q3, employee count was 222,400 employees, and 39,000 of them were hired in Q3 alone to prepare for the holiday rush.

Here's Amazon's total employee count at the end of each of the last few years:

2011: 56,200

2012: 88,400, growth of 32,200 (57%)

2013: 117,300, growth of 28,900 (32%)

2014: 154,100, growth of 36,800 (31%)

2015: 230800, growth of 76,700 (50%)

Disclosure: Jeff Bezos is an investor in Business Insider through hispersonal investment company Bezos Expeditions.