 "Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer quietly cuts 1000 jobs in less than a year")
Yahoo has been seeing a lot of changes after CEO Marrisa Mayer took up the reins almost a year ago. Most of the news has been about the recent acquisitions that the company has been making in the last month. One piece that has been flying under the radar for a while, though, is the lay-offs the Yahoo employee roster has seen in the last year. It has been reported that Yahoo has quietly cut loose 1000 employees since Mayer joined.
Reuters reporter Alexei Oreskovic found out that this was done “through a combination of attrition and ramped-up performance management, with staffers now getting reviewed on a quarterly basis instead of every year.”
The rationale behind this decision is clear. When Mayer took over in July 2012, the company sported a 15,000 employee roster, with 3,000 perma-temps added in as well. While lay offs are not unusual, especially when new management comes into a company, what is unusual is the relative peace that the company has been enjoying despite these cuts. In fact, the Reuters report states that Yahoo’s employee morale is quite high.
Yahoo CEO Mayer has quietly cut 1000 jobs from the employee roster
Yahoo, in the past, has been checkered with more vocal plans of getting rid of its employees, courtesy Mayer’s two immediate predecessors. While ex-PayPal president Scott Thompson, who served as Yahoo’s CEO during the spring of 2012, wanted to push the company through a clear round of layoffs, interim CEO Ross Levinsohn had begun talks with other companies with the plan to sell some of Yahoo’s assets, which in turn would lead to thousands of employees departing.
Under Mayer’s leadership, however, both plans were reviewed and cancelled almost immediately after. Last year, Business Insider had reported that while Mayer, like her predecessors, also planned to reduce the roster, it was to be done in a surgical manner through sniper-style cuts. And this method seems to be successful, with employee review site Glassdoor registering a very high rating for Mayer in terms of popularity. Oreskovic has also reported that new applications for Yahoo jobs now stand at 10,000 applications a week, which is double of what the company saw last year.