It wasn’t long ago that Amazon, Shopify and Peloton doubled their workforces to manage through the pandemic surge, while Morgan Stanley staffed up to handle a record level of IPOs, and mortgage lenders added headcount as rock-bottom rates led to a refinancing boom.
On the flipside, Delta Air Lines, Hilton Worldwide and legions of restaurants slashed headcount because of lockdowns that rolled through much of the country and other parts of the world.
Now, they’re scrambling to reverse course.
Companies that hired like crazy in 2020 and 2021 to meet customer demand are being forced to make sweeping cuts or impose hiring freezes with a possible recession on the horizon. In a matter of months, CEOs have gone from hyper-growth mode to concerns over “macroeconomic uncertainty,” a phrase investors have heard many times on second-quarter earnings calls. Stock trading app Robinhood and crypto exchange Coinbase both recently slashed more than 1,000 jobs after their splashy market debuts in 2021.
Meanwhile, airlines, hotels and eateries face the opposite problem as their businesses continue to pick up following the era of Covid-induced shutdowns. After instituting mass layoffs early in the pandemic, they can’t hire quickly enough to satisfy demand, and are dealing with a radically different labor market than the one they experienced over two years ago, before the cutbacks.
“The pandemic created very unique, once-in-a-lifetime conditions in many different industries that caused a dramatic reallocation of capital,” said Julia Pollak, chief economist at job recruiting site ZipRecruiter. “Many of those conditions no longer apply so you’re seeing a reallocation of capital back to more normal patterns.”
For employers, those patterns are particularly challenging to navigate, because inflation levels have jumped to a 40-year high, and the Fed has lifted its benchmark rate by 0.75 percentage point on consecutive occasions for the first time since the early 1990s.
The central bank’s efforts to tamp down inflation have raised concerns that the U.S. economy is headed for recession. Gross domestic product has fallen for two straight quarters, hitting a widely accepted rule of thumb for recession, though the National Bureau of Economic Research hasn’t yet made that declaration.
The downward trend was bound to happen eventually, and market experts lamented the frothiness in stock prices and absurdity of valuations as late as the fourth quarter of last year, when the major indexes hit record highs led by the riskiest assets.
That was never more evident than in November, when electric vehicle maker Rivian went public on almost no revenue and quickly reached a market cap of over $150 billion. Bitcoin hit a record the same day, touching close to $69,000.
Since then, bitcoin is off by two-thirds, and Rivian has lost about 80% of its value. In July, the car company started layoffs of about 6% of its workforce. Rivian’s headcount almost quintupled to around 14,000 between late 2020 and mid-2022.
Tech layoffs and an air of caution
Job cuts and hiring slowdowns were big talking points on tech earnings calls last week.
Amazon reduced its headcount by 99,000 people to 1.52 million employees at the end of the second quarter after almost doubling in size during the pandemic, when it needed to beef up its warehouse capabilities. Shopify, whose cloud technology helps retailers build and manage online stores, cut roughly 1,000 workers, or around 10% of its global workforce. The company doubled its headcount over a two-year period starting at the beginning of 2020, as the business boomed from the number or stores and restaurants that had to suddenly go digital.
Shopify CEO Tobias Lutke said in a memo to employees that the company had wagered that the pandemic surge would cause the transition from physical retail to ecommerce to “permanently leap ahead by 5 or even 10 years.”
“It’s now clear that bet didn’t pay off,” Lutke wrote, adding that the picture was starting to look more like it did before Covid. “Ultimately, placing this bet was my call to make and I got this wrong. Now, we have to adjust.”
After Facebook parent Meta missed on its results and forecast a second straight quarter of declining revenue, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the company will be reducing job growth over the next year. Headcount expanded by about 60% during the pandemic.
“This is a period that demands more intensity and I expect us to get more done with fewer resources,” Zuckerberg said.
Google parent Alphabet, which grew its workforce by over 30% during the two Covid years, recently told employees that they needed to focus and improve productivity. The company asked for suggestions on how to be more efficient at work.
“It’s clear we are facing a challenging macro environment with more uncertainty ahead,” CEO Sundar Pichai said in a meeting with employees. “We should think about how we can minimize distractions and really raise the bar on both product excellence and productivity.”
Few U.S. companies have been hit as hard as Peloton, which became an instant gym replacement during lockdowns and has since suffered from massive oversupply issues and out-of-control costs. After doubling headcount in the 12 months ended June 30, 2021, the company in February announced plans to cut 20% of corporate positions as it named a new CEO.
Banks and Wall Street bracing for a ‘hurricane’
Some of the Pelotons that were flying off the shelves in the pandemic were being offered as perks for overworked junior bankers, who were sorely needed to help manage a boom in IPOs, mergers and stock issuance. Activity picked up with such ferocity that junior bankers were complaining about 100-hour workweeks, and banks started scouring for talent in unusual places like consulting and accounting firms.
That helps explain why the six biggest U.S. banks added a combined 59,757 employees from the start of 2020 through the middle of 2022, the equivalent of the industry picking up the full population of a Morgan Stanley or a Goldman Sachs in a little over two years.
It wasn’t just investment banking. The government unleashed trillions of dollars in stimulus payments and small business loans designed to keep the economy moving amid the widespread shutdowns. A feared wave of loan defaults never arrived, and banks instead took in an unprecedented flood of deposits. Their Main Street lending operations had better repayment rates than before the pandemic.
Among top banks, Morgan Stanley saw the biggest jump in headcount, with its employee levels expanding 29% to 78,386 from early 2020 to the middle of this year. The growth was fueled in part by CEO James Gorman’s acquisitions of money management firms E-Trade and Eaton Vance.
At rival investment bank Goldman Sachs, staffing levels jumped 22% to 47,000 in the same timeframe, as CEO David Solomon broke into consumer finance and bolstered wealth management operations, including through the acquisition of fintech lender GreenSky.
Citigroup saw a 15% boost in headcount during the pandemic, while JPMorgan Chase added 8.5% to its workforce, becoming the industry’s largest employer.
But the good times on Wall Street didn’t last. The stock market had its worst first half in 50 years and IPOs dried up. Investment banking revenue at the major players declined sharply in the second quarter.
Goldman Sachs responded by slowing hiring and is considering a return to year-end job reductions, according to a person with knowledge of the bank’s plans. Employees typically make up the single biggest line item when it comes to expenses in banking, so when markets crater, layoffs are usually on the horizon.
JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon warned investors in June that an economic “hurricane” was on its way, and said the bank was bracing itself for volatile markets.