Twitter is the latest tech company to freeze its hiring. The company has also seen a few high-ranking executives leave amidst a complicated takeover bid from Tesla CEO Elon Musk.
Twitter’s hiring freeze (which extends to backfilling vacant roles) is part of a plan to make the company “responsible and efficient,” according to a statement to Axios. Twitter’s revenue product lead and head of consumer have also left the company in recent days. Bloomberg reports that some offers extended to new employees have been rescinded.
In a memo to employees, Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal explained the need to tweak the company’s roadmap ahead of Musk’s (possible) takeover. “At the beginning of the pandemic in 2020, the decision was made to invest aggressively to deliver big growth in audience and revenue, and as a company we did not hit intermediate milestones that enable confidence in these goals,” he wrote. “In order to responsibly manage the organization as we sharpen our roadmaps and our work, we need to continue to be intentional about our teams, hiring and costs.”
Twitter isn’t the only tech giant to slow or freeze hiring in recent days. Both Uber and Meta have announced a temporary pause in recruiting and onboarding; other cost-cutting measures have included Meta rolling back some of its world-famous in-office perks, including on-site laundry and dry cleaning. Like Twitter, both of these companies are facing pressures on their existing strategies; in Meta’s case, for example, the entire company is reorienting itself around the ”metaverse,” a buzzword for an ecosystem of augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) apps.
Despite this drama at some tech giants, the tech unemployment rate stood at 1.7 percent in April, just a slight uptick from 1.4 percent in March. Data suggests employers remain hungry for all kinds of tech talent; according to CompTIA’s analysis of the latest U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data, demand has been particularly strong for software developers and engineers, IT project managers, IT support specialists, systems engineers and architects, and network engineers and architects.
