In the face of mounting pressure to downsize, and with Salesforce seemingly still recuperating from its pandemic-era hiring spree, the company is diving back into the realm of hiring once more—starting with its messaging subsidiary, Slack.
In a note to staff Tuesday, Slack CEO Lidiane Jones announced that the company is looking to hire for a “significant number of new roles” in Q3 on the product development engineer (PDE) team, according to a message viewed by Fortune. These roles will be focused on generative A.I. among other Slack features like Huddles and Lists. This comes less than six months after Slack parent company Salesforce laid off 10% of its staff, about 8,000 people, in Q1 of this year.
“We will bring in top talent from across the industry to achieve these goals. 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,” Jones wrote. “I can’t wait to see what we can accomplish together in FY24!”
It’s not clear how many Slack employees were among the 8,000 companywide employees that Salesforce laid off in Q1. In potentially rehiring some of the workers it laid off just months earlier, Slack represents the latest tech company to do a staffing U-turn in its efforts to navigate a choppy economy and to cut costs. Twitter famously sought to rehire certain staffers shortly after owner Elon Musk laid off a vast portion of the company in November.
“We’re looking to hire great people that have the skill sets to move our work forward—whether those are new hires into Slack or those who worked here at any time in the past,” a Slack spokesperson told Fortune.
The new hiring plans come as Slack parent company Salesforce is ramping up its A.I. efforts and emphasizing its bullish view of the technology. During the company’s most recent earnings call, CEO Marc Benioff expounded on the company’s ambitious A.I. endeavors, weaving in an anecdote of a dinner with his esteemed neighbor, OpenAI founder Sam Altman. In the same earnings call, Benioff depicted an imminent A.I. “supercycle,” adding that CEOs will need to “aggressively” invest in A.I. “to remain competitive.”
Salesforce recently introduced Einstein GPT, a generative A.I. tool aimed at enhancing sales, marketing, and customer service agents’ efficiency, CNBC reported. Additionally, Salesforce is actively developing a myriad of other “GPTs,” according to a Salesforce blog post, including Sales GPT, Service GPT, Marketing GPT, Commerce GPT, Slack GPT, and Tableau GPT.
With the countless efforts to keep up with the industry’s A.I. craze, Benioff appears to already be putting the company’s recent challenges in the rearview mirror. Salesforce narrowly escaped a proxy fight with activist investors who had been pressuring the company to cut costs. In response to the investor pressure, Salesforce announced the aforementioned layoffs, as well as a planned reduction of $3 billion to $5 billion in costs, and the disbanding of its board’s mergers and acquisitions committee.
Slack’s recently departed CEO Stewart Butterfield even criticized the hiring frenzy that occurred across Silicon Valley in Bloomberg’s Odd Lots podcast a few weeks ago. Butterfield dubbed it the “root of all the excess,” driven by lack of constraints on hiring and managers’ pursuit of prestige.
