SA国际传媒

Looks like is kicking off high-profile tech layoffs in 2023.

Layoff news quelled in the weeks leading up to the winter holidays. But it only took four days into the new year for the enterprise cloud platform to announce it will lay off around 10% of its staff in the coming weeks. This comes after spending two years of overhiring, like many other tech companies.

鈥淚鈥檝e been thinking a lot about how we came to this moment,鈥� CEO said . 鈥淎s our revenue accelerated through the pandemic, we hired too many people leading into this economic downturn we鈥檙e now facing, and I take responsibility for that.鈥�

Salesforce1 back in February, and previously laid off 1,090 workers back in November, per SA国际传媒 layoffs data. A 10% layoff amounts to roughly 680 workers affected by the news.

Major party foul

If you asked me which U.S.-based company would announce layoffs early on in 2023, I wouldn鈥檛 have picked the publicly traded enterprise platform that already went through an employee cut in November. In a previous story I noted these sweeping mass layoffs from large tech companies are a good sign there would be no future layoffs from that company. Salesforce, however, conducted two rounds in the span of two months.

A company conducting multiple rounds of layoffs is already a bit of a rarity. According to SA国际传媒 data, around 9% of the 433 tech companies we tracked laid people off more than once through 2022.

, CEO of consulting firm (who headed up the talent teams at and ) called multiple layoffs 鈥渁 gigantic management failure.鈥�

鈥淚f I am an employee in a company that’s going through multiple rounds of layoffs unexpectedly, I’m losing faith in the business and I’m living in fear,鈥� Church said.

Multiple rounds of layoffs often happen at smaller startups, not large tech firms helmed by seasoned executives managing tens of thousands employees globally. Around 65% of tech companies that conducted a second or third round of layoffs were private startups. The rest were only a handful of publicly traded companies such as , and , which undertook more than two layoffs over the span of the year.

Illustration: Dom Guzman