Twitter Lays Off 30% of its Recruitment Team

Twitter laid off 30% of its talent acquisition team on Thursday, according to the Wall Street Journal. This comes as the social media company continues in its back-and-forth acquisition deal that has lingered for months now with Tesla CEO, Elon Musk.

You will recall that in May, Twitter announced a companywide hiring freeze. A Twitter spokesperson confirmed these layoffs but declined to mention the exact number of the affected employees.

The company spokesperson added that employees will receive severance packages and said that the remaining recruitment staff will be reprioritized due to decreased hiring. Twitter is pausing most hiring and backfills, aside from the most critical roles.

This might not be unconnected with the lingering acquisition deals, where Musk speculated publicly that he would cut staff once he takes over the company. And the economic downturn has taken a toll on the social media company’s projected profit. According to reports, about 30,000 tech workers have been laid off in the last two months, and social networks aren’t immune to the market downturn. Competitors like Snap and Meta have also taken precautionary measures to manage their overhead in a time of economic upheaval. Just last week, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told employees that they should prepare to do more work with fewer resources.

Also, Twitter’s executives have witnessed some serious reshuffling since Parag Agrawal took over from Jack Dorsey as CEO. After the deal with Elon Musk was announced, Agrawal fired the consumer GM, Keyvon Beykpour, and revenue product lead, Bruce Falck.

So far, Agrawal has made several other key personnel changes since assuming his new role in December. During this period, Twitter lost its chief design officer, Dantley Davis, and, head of engineering, Michael Montano. A month later, Twitter lost two more leaders, chief information security officer, Rinki Sethi, and head of security, Peiter Zatko.

At that time, Agrawal tweeted, “Some have been asking why a ‘lame-duck’ CEO would make these changes if we’re getting acquired anyway. While I expect the deal to close, we need to be prepared for all scenarios and always do what’s right for Twitter.”

Agrawal himself will also likely lose his short-lived CEO role if Musk succeeds in his acquisition plan.

Musk has said during an all-hands call with Twitter employees that he’s not concerned with what title he’d have at the company, but that he wants to be heavily involved in the product. At that meeting, Twitter employees voiced concerns about potential layoffs in response to the macroeconomic environment.

“Right now, costs exceed revenue. That’s not a great situation,” he said regarding potential Twitter layoffs.