Salesforce Inc., which last week said it would be slashing 10% of its workforce, or about 8,000 people, has disclosed a wave of layoffs at its San Francisco headquarters in a filing with the state of California.
A total of 752 job cuts will become effective March 24, Salesforce CRM, -1.72% said in a letter to the state’s Employment Development Department.
The letter said the cuts, which the company expects to be permanent, affect employees at three locations in San Francisco in the following job categories: 194 in general administration, 117 in sales and customer service, and 441 in technology and product.
The layoffs follow an undisclosed number of job cuts by Salesforce last year, which a spokeswoman said affected temporary recruiting contractors. The company did not submit any letters to the state EDD about any employee job cuts in California — where it has a huge presence and is San Francisco’s biggest private employer — last year. More cuts are expected in the coming weeks, per a letter Chief Executive Marc Benioff sent to employees and filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission last week.
Salesforce’s planned mass layoffs are among others in the tech industry that are being attributed to over-hiring during the past few years. Benioff told employees last week when he announced the job cuts that “as our revenue accelerated through the pandemic, we hired too many people leading into this economic downturn we’re now facing, and I take responsibility for that.”
That echoes what Meta Platforms Inc. META, -0.08% CEO Mark Zuckerberg told his employees in November, when he announced that he was cutting 11,000 jobs.
Other giant tech companies that are significantly reducing their workforces include Cisco Systems Inc. CSCO, +0.82% and Amazon.com Inc. AMZN, +5.81%. Meanwhile, Google parent Alphabet Inc. GOOGL, +3.51% GOOG, +3.38% is reportedly considering about 10,000 job cuts but has not confirmed that news. Alphabet unit Verily Life Sciences has trimmed 200 jobs out of 1,600, the Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday.
The layoffs at Salesforce follow turnover in its management ranks, including the departure of co-CEO Bret Taylor and Slack Technologies co-founder and CEO Stewart Butterfield.
A Salesforce spokeswoman did not immediately return a request for comment Wednesday.