Corona Jolt: 46% drop in hiring at Microsoft

New Delhi: As new coronavirus shuts down economies and companies freeze fresh hiring, tech giant Microsoft has seen nearly 46 per cent drop in hiring activity while its professional career website LinkedIn has listed even worse just 3 openings for its entire operation.

According to data compiled by alternative data platform Thinknum, Satya Nadella-run tech giant listed 5,580 openings on its main careers site on March 22.

"By April 20, that number sunk to 3,028, a 46 per cent drop in hiring activity," said the platform that allows investors to get data-driven investment ideas by monitoring companies' websites.

On March 1, LinkedIn listed 510 openings. "Microsoft-owned career website LinkedIn has seen an even starker drop in hiring.

LinkedIn's main source of revenue comes from job listings but there are very few new jobs as industries after industries are being hit by the Covid-19 pandemic."

According to Thinknum, the hiring slowdown at Microsoft is across the board. "Of the 20 categories for which the company hires, all have seen drops in openings.

None, however, more so than engineering, for which Microsoft is typically hiring for thousands of openings," it revealed. Not just Microsoft, Google which hired 20,000 employees in 2019 and planned to recruit similar number this year has decided to freeze hiring for the rest of the year as the company fights Covid-19 pandemic.

In an internal memo, Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai said that now is the time to significantly slow down the pace of hiring, "while maintaining momentum in a small number of strategic areas where users and businesses rely on Google for ongoing support, and where our growth is critical to their success".

Google is also recalibrating the focus and pace of its investments "in areas like data centers and machines, and non-business essential marketing and travel".

Employer demand for workers has gone down significantly amid the Covid-19 pandemic, especially from the second half of March and the trend in listings on the job site Indeed was over 30 per cent lower as of April 10 this year in the US than in 2019.

The trend in new postings is down 49.1 per cent compared to 2019 as of April 10, Jed Kolko, Chief Economist at the Indeed Hiring Lab, said in a blog post last week.