Yesterday, Indeed.com announced plans to cut about 2,200 workers, roughly 15% of the company’s workforce. A memo from Indeed CEO Chris Hymans, who himself will take a 25% pay cut, explained that the layoffs are occurring based on the organization anticipating that the job market will cool in the coming future. As a result, Hymans expects that job listings (how the company mainly makes money) will similarly shrink.
“Leading a company whose mission is to help people get jobs, every single day I think about how important a job is in a person’s life,” Hymans wrote. Yet he also added that “our organization is simply too big for what lies ahead.”
“Last quarter, US total job openings were down 3.5% year-over-year, while sponsored job volume fell 33%,” Hymans wrote. “In the US, we are expecting job openings will likely decrease to pre-pandemic levels of about 7.5 million, or even lower over the next two to three years.
“With future job openings at or below pre-pandemic levels, our organization is simply too big for what lies ahead,” Hyams continued. “We have held out longer than many other companies, but the revenue trends are undeniable. So I have decided to act now.”
Yesterday was reportedly the last day for laid-off employees, who Hymans said would come from throughout the org — “every team, function, level, and region.” Most people learned the news within an hour of the announcement with email with the subject line, “Your Position Has Been Impacted.” Staffers whose jobs were spared got emails stating, “Your Position Has Not Been Impacted.” (Local regulations in the U.K., Ireland, the Netherlands, and Japan meant that people working in those countries didn’t all get such emails right away.)
The company is offering laid-off workers at least 16 weeks of base salary pay, among other benefits. People can also keep their work computers (though they’ll be disconnected from Indeed). However, people will still have access to Slack and email to enable them to communicate with colleagues for now.
Indeed’s layoffs are the latest of many impacting the tech industry, most recently at Amazon, which announced its own plans to cut some 9,000 people. Additionally, Meta very recently also announced that it was eliminating 10,000 jobs in its second round of mass layoffs.