Salesforce has rebuffed claims it has imposed a hiring freeze within its company, including its subsidiary, Slack.
The move comes after Fortune alleged it had paused hiring in its technology and product divisions, citing a leaked memo.
The business magazine, Fortune, based its report on a leaked memo from Ross Harmes, Chief of Staff to the Slack CTO, which read:
This isn’t our first rodeo with hiring pauses, but it’s definitely disruptive and will affect our plans in Q1 and beyond.
"Remember, we won’t ask you to do the same amount of work with fewer people, so adjust plans accordingly.
"Headcount that you currently have isn’t going away, it’s just being delayed. We’ll maintain the list of open roles, and continue to add to it when people leave."
Harmes continued: "The good news is that we’ve made a ton of hires over the last six months.
"The bad news is that managers with open roles will feel the pain for a while with understaffed teams."
Now, a spokesperson for Salesforce has hit back, telling Business Insider that "we are not freezing hiring in any departments".
Although Salesforce did not dispute the veracity of the memo, it described it as a ‘misstatement’.
That may come as a relief for members of the Salesforce team, after a rollercoaster of a year in 2023, which started with mass layoffs, impacting over ten percent of its workforce.
More recently, however, Salesforce has recently displayed impressive signs of recovery that suggest Harmes’ words had been taken out of context, such as making a layoff U-turn in September 2023 when it announced its intention to hire 3,300 new employees. That included bringing back some of its former employees.
The Salesforce CEO, Marc Benioff, did not rule out more layoffs, however, which may worry those who believe the company is adopting more of a ‘hire and fire’ culture.
