About 1300 staff from Indeed and Glassdoor are being laid off after their Japanese parent company, ironically named "Recruit Holdings", said it was shifting focus toward AI.
In case you"re unaware, Indeed is a massive job search engine you use to find listings, while Glassdoor is the place you go to anonymously complain about your boss and see if a company"s pay is any good. This is a bad deal for those employees, whose jobs were centered on helping other people find work.
And now, both services are being integrated more tightly, with Glassdoor"s operations being folded into Indeed"s. The cuts are hitting departments like R&D and tech, a memo spotted by Reuters says people across all functions are affected.
According to the memo, Recruit Holdings is focusing on simplifying hiring by using AI. CEO Hisayuki Idekoba wrote, "AI is changing the world, and we must adapt." The company even bragged that its AI finds someone a job every 2.2 seconds. It feels a lot like we saw at Duolingo three months ago, where the company fired a bunch of contractors after bragging that AI was helping it build language courses at a ridiculous speed (150 new courses in a year, with the help of AI, versus 100 courses that took 12 years).
This restructuring is also affecting the leadership, as Glassdoor"s current CEO is leaving on October 1, and Indeed"s chief people officer is also leaving.
AI taking over people"s jobs is nothing new. In fact, for tech giants like Microsoft, this is just another Tuesday. That company recently announced it was cutting another 9000 jobs, all while its leadership insists that AI is not a replacement for human workers.
We also have Amazon"s CEO, Andy Jassy, who flat out said in a CNBC interview that as AI becomes more central to operations, fewer employees will be needed. In a June 17 memo to his staff, the 57-year-old CEO wrote that the corporate workforce will shrink over the next few years because of "efficiency gains from using AI extensively across the company".