Salesforce Inc. is reportedly laying off 1% of its workforce, or about 700 staffers, a few months after launching a hiring effort intended to recruit thousands of new employees.

The Wall Street Journal reported the job cuts today, citing a person familiar with the matter. The source also revealed that Salesforce currently has about 1,000 open positions. That suggests the cloud giant is not so much reducing its workforce as redirecting resources to new areas.

The Journal’s tipster said that the layoffs are meant to help the company “focus its spending on growth” but didn’t go into more detail. It’s unclear which departments are affected.

The layoffs mark the second time Salesforce has cut jobs since the start of 2023. Last January, the company let go 10% of its workforce, which comprised about 80,000 employees at the time. Salesforce closed multiple offices as part of the restructuring. 

Last January’s layoffs came a few months after the company posted disappointing financial results for the second quarter of its 2022 fiscal year. Salesforce’s adjusted earnings per share dropped year-over-year, while its revenue missed analyst expectations. The company also revised its sales guidance downwards. 

A year later, in the second quarter of fiscal 2023, Salesforce delivered financial results that topped analyst expectations. Its adjusted earnings per share nearly doubled in the three months ended June 31, 2023 while revenue jumped 11%. Shortly thereafter, the company announced plans to hire 3,300 new employees. 

Salesforce detailed at the time that a third of the new hires were set to join its sales group. The company planned to add another third to its engineering organization, while the remaining hires were expected to bolster the teams that work on Salesforce’s Data Cloud platform. The platform is used used by marketers to analyze data about customer buying preferences and create personalized ads.

At the time of the hiring effort’s announcement, Salesforce Chief Executive officer Marc Benioff detailed that the company was planning to recruit a significant number of former employees as part of the initiative. That raises the possibility the cloud giant may have rehired some of the workers who were let go as part of last January’s layoffs.

The latest workforce reduction that came to light today follows job cuts at other major enterprise technology companies. 

SAP SE, which competes with Salesforce in some markets, on Tuesday announced plans to offer voluntary buyouts or new roles to as many as 8,000 employees. The company expects to end the year with its current headcount unchanged. Earlier this month, Google LLC reportedly laid off hundreds of employees across its advertising sales, consumer hardware and Google Assistant teams.

Salesforce is expected to release its fourth-quarter financial results in March. In November, the company projected that it would close the quarter with revenues of between $9.18 billion and $9.23 billion, which would represent year-over-year growth of about 10%. 

Photo: Salesforce