Salesforce refutes reports that it's imposing a hiring freeze: 'We are not freezing hiring in any departments'

• Fortune reported that Salesforce and Slack were freezing hiring, citing a leaked memo.
• Salesforce told Business Insider that they aren't freezing hiring in any of their departments.
• The company said it's "continuing strategic hiring" to meet business needs.

Salesforce says it hasn't imposed a hiring freeze within the company and its subsidiary, Slack.

"We are not freezing hiring in any departments," a Salesforce spokesperson told Business Insider. The spokesperson commented on a Fortune report that the tech giant is putting a hiring freeze in place.

"We have made rapid progress on our hiring goals in technology and product to support strategic growth areas like AI," the spokesperson added. The spokesperson said that Salesforce is now "continuing strategic hiring" to meet its business needs.

Fortune said in a report on Wednesday that Salesforce and Slack had paused hiring in their technology and product divisions.

"Headcount that you currently have isn't going away, it's just being delayed. We'll maintain the list of open roles, and continue to add to it when people leave," Ross Harmes, chief of staff to the Slack CTO, wrote in a memo seen by Fortune.

"Remember, we won't ask you to do the same amount of work with fewer people, so adjust plans accordingly," Harmes said in his memo.

Any decision to hire more staff would be "based on how the numbers are looking each quarter," according to the leaked memo obtained by Fortune.

"I would assume at least a quarter," Harmes said in the memo.

Staff at Salesforce and Slack have undergone a period of uncertainty in the past year. Salesforce has oscillated between axing staff, and then hiring new talent aggressively.

In January 2023, Salesforce chief Marc Benioff laid off about 10% of its employees.

"As our revenue accelerated through the pandemic, we hired too many people leading into this economic downturn we're now facing, and I take responsibility for that," Benioff said in an email to staff then.

But in September, the company announced plans to recruit over 3,000 employees.

Benioff told Bloomberg that the company had to "hire thousands of people" to "grow the company and to continue to achieve great margins."

Some tech companies have been tightening their purse strings. On Tuesday, Bloomberg reported that the live-streaming platform Twitch is planning to lay off about 35% of its staff.

Twitch CEO Tom Clancy said in a blog post that Twitch's "user and revenue growth has not kept with our expectations."