The online marketplace Ebay has announced that 1,000 jobs will be cut soon to make the company more resilient going into the future. The company said that the cuts, which will affect 9% of the workforce, will position the company for long-term, sustainable growth.
In addition to cutting jobs at the core of the business, Ebay will be scaling back the contracts it has among its “alternate workforce” over the coming months.
Ebay, like many other tech firms, invested heavily in expansion over the last several years, but due to inflation and the resulting interest rate hikes, credit has become more expensive and customers are cutting spending. Under these new conditions, companies like Ebay need to make cuts.
Ebay CEO Jamie Iannone said:
“Despite facing external pressures, like the challenging macroeconomic environment, we know we can be better with the factors we control. While we are making progress against our strategy, our overall headcount and expenses have outpaced the growth of our business.
To address this, we"re implementing organizational changes that align and consolidate certain teams to improve the end-to-end experience, and better meet the needs of our customers around the world.”
The company has asked U.S. employees to work from home on January 24th so that the conversations can be done with some space and privacy. It said that leaders will deliver the news via Zoom directly and employees’ VP or eLT member will send and email once the notifications in their groups have been completed.
For those affected, the company said it will enter a consultation process where required but the firm gave no more details other than this.
At the end of 2022, Neowin reported on ZipRecruiter data which said that 79% of recently sacked tech employees were able to find new work relatively quickly albeit not in the same sector. With many more cuts happening since then, it’s unclear whether sacked workers will be able to find new jobs as easily.
Source: Ebay