While other software companies are trimming their workforces, Snowflake Inc. plans to continue hiring.
On the heels of a fiscal year in which it added about 1,900 net new employees, Snowflake executives
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anticipate another four-digit addition this year.
“We view the current hiring market as favorable for Snowflake and we’ll continue to prioritize hiring in product, engineering and sales,” Chief Financial Officer Mike Scarpelli said on the company’s earnings call, according to a FactSet transcript. “We expect to add more than 1,000 employees in fiscal 2024.”
He also shared that Snowflake is “slowing down some of our hiring where we don’t see the productivity, but there’s other areas where productivity is doing well,” including with large enterprises.
Snowflake “will not grow our revenue faster unless we see productivity increase in the sales organization, and when we see that increase in productivity, we’ll add more heads there, and we think we’re adding at the appropriate pace based on what we’re seeing in the business today,” Scarpelli added.
At the same time, Scarpelli noted that Snowflake’s move to slow the pace of hiring so far this year is helping to drive “efficiencies in the way we do things.”
Other companies across the technology industry, including in the software sector, have moved to cut jobs this year given a weaker economic climate and aggressive head-count growth during the height of the pandemic.
Salesforce Inc.
CRM,
Workday Inc.
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Okta Inc.
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Splunk Inc.
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and DocuSign Inc.
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are among the software players that have announced recent job cuts. In the technology world more broadly, 120,000-plus employees have been subject to layoffs this year alone.
Snowflake’s commentary comes the same week that Palantir Technologies Inc.
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disclosed that it will be cutting less than 2% of jobs. Its chief executive had said earlier in the year that the company planned to add a couple hundred people to its staff in 2023. A Palantir spokesperson told MarketWatch money thay the company would continue to hire “strategically.”
See also: Palantir joins growing list of tech companies announcing layoffs
Snowflake announced fiscal fourth-quarter earnings Wednesday afternoon, giving a weaker-than-expected forecast and noting that its younger cohorts were ramping on the platform more slowly than older ones did. Shares fell more than 7% in after-hours trading.
