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- Salesforce will look to hire around 3,000 new employees, CEO Marc Benioff told Bloomberg this week.
- The company announced plans to lay off 10% of its staff earlier this year in a major cost-cutting effort.
- Benioff is now urging former staff who joined other firms to return to the company.
Salesforce plans to hire over 3,000 employees across various departments in the company after laying off 10% of its workforce in January, Bloomberg News reported first on Thursday.
"Our job is to grow the company and to continue to achieve great margins," Salesforce's CEO Marc Benioff told Bloomberg News in an interview at the company's annual conference in San Francisco on Thursday. "We know we have to hire thousands of people."
The new hires will work across its sales, engineering, and data cloud product teams and help grow the company's artificial intelligence business to attract further investments, according to chief operating officer Brian Millham, who also spoke to Bloomberg.
Millham told Bloomberg: "We have some very successful parts of our business right now, and we want a surge in those areas."
Benioff informed employees that 8,000 people would be laid off in various rounds of job cuts at the beginning of this year, in a major cost-cutting effort. The company had a headcount of roughly 79,390 at the time.
Employees blasted Saleforce's layoffs internally, per Insider's Ashley Stewart, saying they were handled poorly and that staff were given little clarity about the situation.
"Having to Slack search each of my closest coprimes and ops personnel to see who survived and who didn't," one employee wrote in an internal Slack channel. "It's like checking the missing bulletin board after a major disaster."
Benioff told Bloomberg that he is hoping to attract significant numbers of "boomerangs" — employees who previously worked at Salesforce and moved to other firms — to return to the company in the new hiring drive.
He even said at the conference this week that he held an "alumni event" for people at other companies to say: "It's OK, come back," per Bloomberg.