Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has announced that Salesforce will be hiring 1,000 new graduates and interns to “ride the AI exponential” and work on artificial intelligence projects – specifically Agentforce and Headless 360.
This comes after Salesforce laid off nearly 1,000 employees in early February, including roles within the Agentforce teams.
Hiring for Salesforce’s Biggest AI Projects
On Saturday, Marc Benioff took to X to announce that Salesforce is looking to hire 1,000 new graduates and interns to work on some of the company’s most notable AI projects, including those that involve the proprietary AI Agentforce and the new agentic solution Headless 360.
His post was in response to tech founder David Sacks and his comments on The Wall Street Journal’s recent piece about youth employment in the current job market. The article highlights a new and welcome figure – that the hiring of new college graduates is up 5.6% over last year. This is despite the fact that Anthropic’s CEO, Dario Amodei, warned that AI could cut up to 50% of entry-level jobs.
“You are right, they said AI would kill entry-level jobs,” Benioff wrote. “Meanwhile these grads & interns are building it – powering Agentforce & Headless360 at Salesforce.”
SF Ben has reached out to Salesforce for comment.
How to Apply
It appears that this new hiring wave will become part of the company’s Futureforce initiative – Salesforce’s program dedicated to recruiting university graduates through internships and paid roles. The company has been known to use Futureforce to build skills in high-demand areas, particularly new cloud technology and AI-related roles.
Benioff explained that to apply to be one of the 1,000 new hires, new graduates can either send their resume directly to futureforce@salesforce.com or reach out and drop their resume to the official @salesforcejobs handles.
Fire and Rehire?
Like with any business decision Marc Benioff ultimately spearheads, this one has already garnered mixed opinions. Mark W. Snyder, an Enterprise Account Executive at Google, shared his thoughts on LinkedIn, saying that this effort was “amazing to see”.
“I was incredibly lucky to start my career at Salesforce and will always have a soft spot for the training and mentorship I received,” he wrote.
Blake Rowley, the Senior Manager of Solution Engineering at Twilio, also took the news positively, writing that “we have a duty to not forget about graduates as we progress in AI.”
“Not saying this is directly correlated to it, but any move to provide a future to those most at risk is welcomed in my book,” he wrote.
However, not all sentiments have been so positive. For some, this move from Salesforce has sparked debates over whether or not this is a classic fire and rehire tactic – letting go of seasoned talent in favor of hiring new (cheaper) graduates.
“You laid off roughly 1000 people to then hire 1000 new grads?” one commenter wrote under Benioff’s post. “Interesting.”
The Salesforce CEO’s announcement comes just two months after Salesforce laid off nearly 1,000 employees at the beginning of the year, allegedly including roles within the marketing, product management, and data analytics departments, as well as the Agentforce AI team and Heroku team.
The number of impact employees across each team is unknown, but Salesforce is perhaps looking to plug the gaps left by employees who were let go from AI roles. Does this mean this is a fire and rehire effort? Not necessarily, and ultimately, we don’t know.
But it does seem like a situation that Salesforce can’t get right either way – if it does not hire graduates, it’s not thinking about the future of the tech workforce, and if it does, it is taking opportunities away from seasoned professionals eager to break into the AI space.
There will be some kind of middle ground between focusing all hiring attention on one group over another, but either way, this is bound to generate strong feelings, especially among those affected by the recent job cuts.
Final Thoughts
This move from Salesforce is largely a positive one, focusing on giving young people opportunities in a job market that is still very difficult to navigate. Going forward, hopefully, we will get more information on which kinds of roles are being hired for and where.
Salesforce is currently hiring for over 1,400 specific job openings globally. Whether or not the SaaS giant has shifted its hiring strategy to focus more on graduates, there are still a multitude of roles available across the board. Not only that, but this effort does throw the “death of entry-level tech jobs” narrative into question – could we really be seeing this narrative being rewritten in real time?
