Salesforce Cuts 90 Recruiters Amid Hiring Slowdown

‘While limited hiring continues, most departments have reached their hiring goals for the fiscal year,’ a Salesforce spokesperson told CRN in an email.

Salesforce co-CEO Marc Benioff

Salesforce has “ended contracts with some temporary recruiting contractors” since many of the company’s departments will not be hiring for the rest of its fiscal year, a spokesperson confirmed to CRN.

Social media posts from affected workers putting the number of those cut at around 90 began appearing earlier this week. Protocol first reported the cuts as well as a hiring freeze.

[RELATED: Oracle Lays Off 201 Employees In California]

“While limited hiring continues, most departments have reached their hiring goals for the fiscal year. As a result, we have ended contracts with some temporary recruiting contractors,” a Salesforce spokesperson said in an email to CRN.

At least nine users of the LinkedIn social media network posted to say they no longer work for the San Francisco-based vendor, with At least three of those LinkedIn users saying that “90+” Salesforce employees were laid off. The LinkedIn users said they worked in recruitment and business development. Salesforce has more than 73,000 workers.

The worker cuts come about two months after Salesforce lowered its guidance for the amount of revenue it expects to see for the fiscal year, ending Jan. 31, 2023. It was the second haircut to guidance this year from Salesforce.

Executives in August reported a year-over-year quarterly rise in second-quarter revenue and strong growth with its Slack subsidiary and Sales Cloud and Service Cloud products, but decelerations in Commerce Cloud and Marketing Cloud during the company’s latest quarterly earnings call.

Salesforce co-CEO Marc Benioff said at the time that he and his team saw “customers becoming more measured in the way they buy” and sales cycles “get stretched” with deals “inspected by higher levels of management.”

“Nearly everyone I’ve talked to is taking a more measured approach to their business,” he said. “We expect these trends to continue in the near term.”

Tech Company Layoffs Becoming More Common

Other technology companies to cut workers recently as fears of a recession grow include Oracle, Twilio and Avaya. And Intel may have plans for layoffs as the PC market slumps, according to a report earlier this week.

The reports come amid global economic uncertainty that has the channel preparing for a possible recession. This week, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, former director of the U.S. Congressional Budget Office, told a crowd at CRN parent The Channel Company’s XChange Best of Breed 2022 conference that he expects a modest recession to hit during the middle of 2023 due to the Federal Reserve increasing rates, continuing inflation and uncertainty ahead with China as well as Russia’s war in Ukraine.

Some technology leaders have remained optimistic that IT will remain resilient in a recession. Also speaking this week at Best of Breed, IBM CEO Arvind Krishna said that technology spending generally is growing 3 percent to 4 percent faster than GDP over the past five years.

He told the crowd that energy security, i.e. a readily available supply of uninterrupted, affordable power, and a strong U.S. dollar means the Americas could also weather a recession well, while Japan, India and Australia all show positive data in the face of a recession as well.