Salesforce confirms more workers have been officially laid off

In San Francisco, Thursday’s layoffs affected 258 employees, affecting “sales and customer service,” “technology and products,” and “general administration,” according to the WARN notice obtained by SFGATE. WARN notices are required by the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act to notify employees of mass layoffs.

The 10% cuts that kicked off the brutal January tech layoff announcement would eventually put about 7,000 people out of work. Insider reported Thursday that 4,000 people have disappeared from his Slack channel in Salesforce in the past two days. Salesforce spokesperson Carolyn Guss confirmed to SFGATE that Thursday’s layoffs are part of a round she announced in January.

Layoff posts flooded LinkedIn from across the country and the San Francisco area Thursday morning as employees said goodbye to Salesforce’s “ohana” and put a “#opentowork” filter on their profiles. Benioff has expressed concerns about new sales reps’ productivity, but many of the posts come from employees who have been with him for more than five years.

In Ireland, 200 of the company’s 2,100 employees received notice on Thursday, according to the Irish Independent newspaper. reported.

Benioff said in a January announcement that U.S. layoffs come with a minimum of nearly five months of salary, health insurance, career resources and other benefits. He also took personal responsibility for over-hiring.

It’s been a chaotic quarter for the San Francisco giant, which provides customer management software to other companies and owns both Slack and Tableau. At the end of November 2022, Co-CEO Bret Taylor announced his resignation. A few days later, Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield and Tableau CEO Mark Nelson announced they were leaving the company. His Tamar Yehoshua, Slack’s chief product officer, and Jonathan Prince, senior vice president of marketing and communications, have also submitted their resignations along with Butterfield.

At Dreamforce last year, Benioff suggested that Salesforce would be affected by “some normalization” after seeing strong customer demand and growth early in the pandemic. Salesforce cuts additional headcount as tech stocks crash and B2B sales slow.

“Everything is still big, but there is definitely some coverage that we have to deal with,” he said at a press conference during the event. “I don’t think anyone would object to that.”

Have you heard of anything going on at Salesforce or other tech companies? Feel free to contact technical reporter Stephen Council at stephen.council@sfgate.com.