Salesforce, the titanic San Francisco enterprise software company, is making layoffs – a first this year for the tech giant.
Details remain scarce, but according to Protocol and a terminated employee who posted on LinkedIn, approximately 90 employees were affected. (The majority of the staff involved were contractors to the company’s recruiting department, a Salesforce spokesperson told SFGATE; as noted earlier, Salesforce has been vague about whether the contract workers count as “employees” or “Ohana”.)
“Although limited hiring continues, most departments met their hiring targets for the fiscal year,” a Salesforce spokesperson told SFGATE.
In a particularly tumultuous time for the tech industry, Salesforce has emerged as a rare anomaly: a tech giant that continues to thrive despite headwinds. Salesforce’s total revenue for fiscal 2022 was $26.5 billion, a 25% year-over-year increase.
The company recently took over San Francisco with its latest iteration of Dreamforce, the company’s first in-person event since the COVID-19 pandemic. Over 40,000 people attended. Still, at the conference, co-CEO Marc Benioff hinted at the idea of ​​”some level of normalization” after the pandemic period of massive growth for Salesforce and other tech companies.
“Everything is still bigger, but there is definitely a surplus to manage,†he told a press conference at the event. “I don’t think anyone will disagree with that.”
In addition to the layoffs, Protocol reports, Salesforce is enacting a hiring freeze through January 2023. The move is small but significant; big tech companies, on the whole, have been reluctant to make layoffs even as startups and other fledgling companies lay off employees.
The Salesforce representative did not provide details on the severance packages the affected workers will receive.
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