Salesforce Inc. has revealed plans to recruit 3,300 new employees less than a year after letting go 10% of its workforce.

Salesforce Chief Executive Officer Marc Benioff and Chief Operating System Brian Millham disclosed the plan to Bloomberg on Thursday, as the company closed its annual Dreamforce conference in San Francisco.

About a third of the new hires will join the company’s sales group, while another third will become part of its engineering organization. The remaining recruits will work on Salesforce’s Data Cloud product.

Data Cloud is a software-as-a-service platform that allows companies to pool customer information from different sources in one place. A retailer, for example, could combine information about customers’ in-store purchases and online orders. Such records are typically stored in different systems, which makes them difficult to analyze.

Companies leverage the information they move into Data Cloud to support their marketing efforts. Using artificial intelligence features built into the platform, marketers can group customers with similar buying preferences and create personalized ads tailored to their interests. Data Cloud also provides analytics features for tracking business metrics such average purchase value. 

The platform draws on assets that Salesforce obtained through two of its largest acquisitions. Companies can move customer information from external systems into Data Cloud using MuleSoft, a software integration platform that Salesforce bought in 2018 for $6.5 billion. Tableau, which the company acquired the following year, can be used to visualize customer information in dashboards.

Salesforce’s disclosure of its workforce expansion plan comes eight months after the cloud giant laid off 10% of its workforce, or about 8,000 employees. Benioff stated at the time that the move was made because the company’s customers were “taking a more measured approach” to software spending. A few months prior to the the layoffs, Salesforce lowered its revenue guidance for its fiscal year ended Jan. 31, 2023, by $800 million, to between $30.9 billion and $31 billion.

Salesforce’s earnings have improved considerably since. Last quarter, the company easily topped analyst expectations with a $1.27 billion net income and revenues of $8.6 billion, which represented 11% year-over-year sales growth. Salesforce also raised its revenue guidance for the current fiscal year to between $34.7 billion to $34.8 billion.

“Our job is to grow the company and to continue to achieve great margins,” Benioff told Bloomberg. 

The executive added that many of the 3,300 employees Salesforce plans to recruit will be professionals who had worked at the company before. Benioff said that Salesforce has already hired employees from Snowflake Inc. and Twilio Inc. The company had 70,456 employees as of July.

Photo: Salesforce