Salesforce looking to hire 3,300 people following earlier job cuts
A significant portion of the new hires will include 'boomerang' employees
Cloud-based software company Salesforce is preparing to bring aboard 3,300 people across its various departments following a 10% jobs cut earlier this year.
The company is also actively encouraging its former employees to consider applying for these new positions.
"Our job is to grow the company and to continue to achieve great margins," Salesforce's CEO Marc Benioff told Bloomberg in an interview at the company's annual conference in San Francisco last week.
"We know we have to hire thousands of people," Benioff added.
Chief Operating Officer Brian Millham, speaking to Bloomberg, said the new recruits will be deployed across the sales, engineering and data cloud product teams, and will contribute to the expansion of the company's AI business to attract further investments.
"We have some very successful parts of our business right now, and we want a surge in those areas," Millham said.
Salesforce is actively working to decrease costs, enhance profitability and reignite revenue growth for the past several months.
In January, the company announced its intention to reduce its workforce and shutter certain offices. The decision followed a period of rapid pandemic-related hiring, which it said had resulted in an excessively large workforce during an economic downturn.
"The environment remains challenging, and our customers are taking a more measured approach to their purchasing decisions," Benioff wrote in an email to staff at the time. "With this in mind, we've made the very difficult decision to reduce our workforce by about 10%, mostly over the coming weeks."
In January, the company's headcount stood at approximately 79,390 employees.
Salesforce reported better-than-expected results in Q2, and is now placing its bets on AI as a key driver for further improving its financial performance. The company recently introduced a suite of AI features and also implemented its first price increase in seven years.
Earlier this month, the company unveiled a generative AI tool named Einstein Copilot. This tool is accessible across its suite of applications, spanning from the instant messaging service Slack to the data visualisation tool Tableau.
The incoming hires at Salesforce will bring back 40% of the workforce that was reduced in January, but company executives have indicated that additional strategic cuts may still be possible in the future.
Benioff told Bloomberg that he is hoping to draw in a substantial number of "boomerangs" during this latest recruitment effort. Boomerangs are individuals who were formerly part of Salesforce but later pursued opportunities at other companies.
Benioff mentioned that he had recently brought on board senior workers from Twilio and Snowflake who had prior experience at Salesforce. He even said he had hosted an "alumni event for people who are employed in other companies to say—it's OK, come back."
In June, Salesforce's subsidiary Slack revealed its intentions to fill a "significant number of new positions" during Q3, primarily within the product development engineer team, with a strong focus on generative AI.
"We will bring in top talent from across the industry to achieve these goals," Slack CEO Lidiane Jones wrote in a note to staff, according to Fortune.
"Our hope and aim is to welcome back some former Slack employees among these new hires whose skill sets can help us move this exciting work forward," Jones added.