Salesforce hiring 3,300 employees after laying off 8,000

The San Francisco-based company is hiring employees in various departments including engineering, sales and its data cloud business

After laying off 8,000 employees earlier this year, Salesforce is looking to rehire about 40 per cent of that lost workforce.

Salesforce will reportedly be hiring around 3,300 new employees in 2023, including some employees who were recently let go.

The San Francisco-based company is seeking to hire employees in various departments including engineering, sales and Salesforce's data cloud business.

"We know we have to hire thousands of people," Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff told Bloomberg, which first reported the news.

Salesforce did not respond to a CRN US request for comment regarding the hires by press time.

In January, Benioff cited the challenging economic environment and customers tightening their budgets as the main reasons for the 8,000 layoffs.

"With this in mind, we've made the very difficult decision to reduce our workforce by about 10 per cent, mostly over the coming weeks," he said in a January letter to employees.

With the 3,300 new employees expected to be hired, this means the San Francisco-based company will only see a 4,700 reduction in head count in 2023.

The news comes after the company's massive Salesforce Dreamforce 2023 event last week, which saw a slew of new product and enhanced partnership launches.

Slack hiring

Slack, a popular messaging subsidiary of Salesforce, is also reportedly looking to hire new, or rehire former staff, in a move to drive generative AI.

Slack was looking to hire a significant number of new roles during its third quarter in its product development engineering team with a focus on generative AI.

"We will bring in top talent from across the industry to achieve these goals," said Slack CEO Lidiane Jones in a message to employees in June.

"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."

At Dreamforce 2023, generative AI was the main focus, with the company debuting its Einstein 1 Platform, an AI tool that promises the ability to safely connect any data for AI-powered application-building.

"We want to build the trusted AI platform for customer companies so that everyone is an Einstein and more productive," Benioff said at Dreamforce.

"We think that trust is the highest priority here.

"We want to turn it over to you - but only with trust.

"We want to make sure it's integrated. We want to make sure it's intelligent.

"We want to make sure it's automated. We want to make sure it's low-code and no-code. We want to make sure it's open… This is our life's work.

"This is what we've been doing for 25 years."

Salesforce second quarter 2023 earnings

The CRM software superstar recently generated $8.6bn in sales during its second quarter of 2023.

This represented a sales increase of 11 per cent year over year.

Salesforce recently raised its expected full fiscal year revenue from between $34.5bn and $34.7bn to between $34.7bn and $34.8bn.

Salesforce stock is up 41 per cent Monday compared with one year ago, trading around $215 as of Monday morning.