Salesforce’s Slack to rehire former staff to fuel generative A.I. ambitions

Salesforce begins hiring again, starting with Slack, in response to increasing pressure to reduce staff.

According to sources, Slack CEO Lidiane Jones announced in a note to staff that the company plans to fill a "significant number of new roles" on the product development engineer (PDE) team in Q3. In addition to other Slack features like Huddles and Lists, these roles will be center on generative AI. This occurs less than six months after Salesforce, the company that owns Slack, fired 8,000 employees, or 10% of its workforce, during the first quarter of this year.

In order to accomplish these objectives, top talent from across the industry will be recruited, according to Jones. The hope and objective of the business were to welcome back some former Slack workers among these new hires, whose skill sets could aid the business in advancing this exciting work.

Jones went on to say that she was eager to see what the business could accomplish in FY24.

It's unclear how many of the 8,000 employees across the company that Salesforce let go in Q1 worked for Slack. Slack is the latest tech company to make a staffing U-turn in an effort to navigate a volatile economy and reduce costs. It may rehire some of the employees it let go just a few months earlier. After Elon Musk, the company's owner, fired a sizable portion of the workforce in November, Twitter made headlines for trying to rehire a few employees.