Over the past couple of weeks, Salesforce has laid off an additional 300 employees – this is in addition to the 1%, or 700 employees, earlier this year.
Although the S&P500 is sitting at all-time highs, the tech industry is still struggling, and looking to cut costs where they are not seeing value from their employees or teams.
Why the Sudden Layoffs?
Salesforce, like many tech companies during the post-COVID digital transformation boom, hired like crazy to keep up with demand. Then, in a cruel twist of fate, share prices sunk to a recent all-time low at the end of 2022, and activist investors jumped on board to push changes at Salesforce.
Marc Benioff, CEO & Co-Founder of Salesforce, ultimately managed to fight off the activist investors after securing some consistent quarterly results, and massively improving profitability. But since these first positive quarterly results back in March 2023, quarterly revenue has continued to decline, and now Salesforce are staring down the barrel of single-digit quarterly growth; something they have not experienced in their lifetime.
Salesforce isn’t the only company struggling at the moment. There have been just over 5,000 layoffs in the past couple of weeks from high-profile tech companies such as Intuit, UIPath, UKG, and OpenText, according to layoffs.fyi.
Bloomberg first broke the news and reached out to a Salesforce spokesperson for comment; “Like any healthy business, we continuously assess whether we have the right structure in place to best serve our customers and fuel growth areas. In some cases, that leads to roles being eliminated”.
Someone familiar with the matter stated that both the Ignite and Horizons business strategy for top-tier accounts has been scaled back.
It’s interesting to note, that Salesforce still has 1,119 open jobs available on their careers website.
Final Thoughts
Unfortunately, this seems like more of the same type of layoffs that we have been experiencing over the past 18 months or so, as large tech companies majorly rethink their strategies.
Make sure to leave your thoughts in the comments below…