Salesforce to Hire 3,300 in Engineering, Data, Sales After Earlier Job Cuts

(Bloomberg) -- Salesforce Inc. is hiring 3,300 people across departments, marking a new investment after it eliminated 10% of its workforce in a restructuring earlier this year.

“Our job is to grow the company and to continue to achieve great margins,” Chief Executive Officer Marc Benioff said Thursday in an interview at the company’s annual conference in San Francisco. “We know we have to hire thousands of people.” 

The pool of new hires will be roughly equally split among sales, engineering, and those working on the company’s data cloud product, Chief Operating Officer Brian Millham said. “We have some very successful parts of our business right now, and we want a surge in those areas.”

Salesforce is betting that interest in artificial intelligence will fuel a new cycle of tech investment, particularly in its data cloud product, which helps customers organize information from multiple sources. It announced earlier this week that existing clients will get to use some capacity of data cloud for free.

The San Francisco-based company, the top maker of customer relations software, is trying to reduce expenses, boost profit and revive revenue growth. Investors have backed the company’s efforts, sending shares up 65% this year through Thursday’s close.

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The new hires restore 40% of the headcount that was slashed in January, when Salesforce said it would eliminate 8,000 jobs amid an effort to boost profits. But executives have said further strategic cuts may still occur. The company reported it had 70,456 workers at the end of July.

Many of the hires will be “boomerangs,” or people who worked at Salesforce before going to a different company, Benioff said. Attracting boomerangs is a new success metric for the company, he added.

Benioff said he’d recently hired senior workers from Snowflake Inc. and Twilio Inc. who previously worked at Salesforce. During the company’s annual conference in San Francisco this week, Benioff said he held an “alumni event for people who are employed in other companies to say — it’s OK, come back.”