Salesforce, San Francisco's largest private employer, laid off thousands of employees on Thursday morning. Technique giant moves in his Plan To cut its workforce by 10%.
The corporate software company blamed the round of layoffs originally announced on Jan. 4 on overhiring during the pandemic. In a two-hour meeting the next day, CEO Marc Benioff complained that half the company's salespeople were responsible for 96% of sales, according to a report. cnbc report,
In San Francisco, Thursday's round of layoffs affected 258 employees, affecting “sales and customer service,” “technology and product” and “general administration,” according to a WARN notice obtained by SFGATE. WARN notices are mandated by the Employee Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act to inform employees of mass layoffs.
The 10% cut, which started a brutal January spate of tech layoff announcements, will ultimately put about 7,000 people out of work. insider reported Thursday that 4,000 people disappeared from Salesforce's Slack channel over the past two days, a tally that may have included contractors. Salesforce spokeswoman Carolyn Guss confirmed to SFGate that Thursday's layoffs were part of a round announced in January.
Layoff posts flooded LinkedIn from across the country and around San Francisco on Thursday morning, as workers bid adieu to their Salesforce “ohana” and put “#opentowork” filters on their profiles. Although Benioff has expressed concern about the productivity of the new sales staff, many of the positions are coming from employees who had been at the company for more than five years.
In Ireland, 200 of the firm's 2,100 employees received their notices on Thursday, according to irish independent, Insider reported that hundreds of employees will also be laid off in England, Germany and France.
In the January announcement, Benioff said the US layoffs would come with a minimum of about five months' pay, health insurance, career resources and other benefits. He also took personal responsibility for the overhiring.
It's been a chaotic quarter for the San Francisco titan, which provides customer management software for other companies and owns both Slack and Tableau. In late November 2022, co-CEO Brett Taylor announced his departure. A few days later, Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield and Tableau CEO Mark Nelson said they would be leaving. And Slack chief product officer Tamar Yehoshua and senior vice president of marketing and communications Jonathan Prince submitted their resignations along with Butterfield.
During last year's Dreamforce, Benioff suggested that Salesforce would be affected by “some level of normalization” after seeing significant customer demand and growth in the early days of the pandemic. As tech stocks tumble and business-to-business sales slow, Salesforce has cut additional workforce.
“Everything is still big, but there is definitely some coverage that has to be dealt with,” he said at a press conference during the event. “I don't think anyone would disagree with that.”
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