Elon Musk Says Twitter Is in Hiring Mode, Weeks After Layoffs: Report

Twitter’s new owner Elon Musk told staff in an all-hands meeting that the company does not plan more layoffs and is recruiting for engineering and ad sales roles, according to a report. Musk on Monday tweeted that the company was pausing the relaunch of Twitter Blue until there was a “high confidence of stopping impersonation”.

According to a report by The Verge, Elon Musk told employees during a hands-on meeting that Twitter is now in hiring mode, weeks after the company purged more than half of its 7,500 employees. The firm’s remaining workers were reportedly told that Twitter is looking to fill its engineering and sales teams and the company has encouraged employees to make referrals.

The news comes a week after hundreds of Twitter employees were said to have resigned from the firm following an ultimatum by new owner Elon Musk that staffers sign up for “long hours at high intensity,” or leave. Last week, Musk emailed Twitter employees, saying: “Going forward, to build a breakthrough Twitter 2.0 and succeed in an increasingly competitive world, we will need to be extremely hardcore”.

The email asked staff to click “yes” if they wanted to stick around. Those who did not respond by 5pm EST on Thursday would be considered to have quit and given a severance package, the email said.

Reuters previously reported that 42 percent of 180 people chose the answer for “Taking exit option, I’m free!” in a poll on the workplace app Blind, which verifies employees through their work email addresses and allows them to share information anonymously. A quarter said they had chosen to stay “reluctantly,” and only 7 percent of the poll participants said they “clicked yes to stay, I’m hardcore.”

In an apparent jab at Musk’s call for employees to be “hardcore,” the Twitter profile bios of several departing engineers last week described themselves as “softcore engineers” or “ex-hardcore engineers.”