A recession is looming, and companies are being forced to respond with hiring freezes and layoffs.
As a result, HR teams are on the frontline of employers’ response to the economic crisis. But, of course, this doesn’t make them immune from layoffs. In fact they are becoming a target since some of their roles, particularly those in talent attraction and acquisition, are increasingly less important to businesses where hiring freezes are in place. .
Tech giants have been leading the way with job cuts in HR departments. At the end of June, Substack laid off 14% of its workforce, including members of HR, operations and support departments.
Co-founder and CEO Chris Best shared on Twitter: “While we’re still haring for specific key roles, it’s at a slower pace and obviously our team has been pared down.”
Then in early July, Twitter decided to lay off a third of its talent acquisition team. The remaining almost 70% of workers will be transferred to different parts of the organization since a hiring freeze is int place.
Just a month later, giant Apple joined the fray and laid off 100 contract recruiters globally. This comes as Apple is trying to decelerate its hiring practices.
The latest tech company to lay off a HR team is Okta.
Inside HR job cuts at Okta
Okta’s head of global sourcing Jody Simon shared on LinkedIn: “This morning we received the dreaded news that the entire US Sourcing Team at Okta has been eliminated”.
She continued: “I have no regrets in having taken this role and have grown in ways I couldn’t even have imagined.
“I have also had the pleasure of leading the most amazing of sourcing teams. If you are hiring for sourcers, please consider one or more of these incredible beings”.
Individuals responded to the news on anonymous social media platform Blind.
One person wrote: “They were literally “aggressively” hiring last week”. While another who claimed to work at Okta said: “No comment from the company yet to everyone else. Love that transparency value”.
Another Okta employee commented: “We learnt it from LinkedIn and Blind”, rather than from the company directly.
UNLEASH reached out to Okta to find out more. The security giant shared that the layoff affects 24 people, around 0.4% of its total global workforce.
Talking about the job cuts, a spokesperson at Okta noted: “We are investing in high-growth areas for our customers and plan to grow our overall headcount this year with over 500 roles open today.”
Watch this space to see if other tech giants are forced to cut their HR teams, or whether Okta will have to start reduce the number of open roles in response to the recession.
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