Tech companies cut hiring, with analysts seeing ~20% drops in job openings between mid-March and mid-April, steep drops in supply chain logistics and delivery
- Despite the massive shift to remote work and the surge in demand for certain online services, the tech industry has seen a widespread drawdown in job listings. Tweets: @carnage4life . Thanks: @mattrosoff Tweets: Dare Obasanjo / @carnage4life : Grubhub has reduced corporate job listings by 94% this year. Instacart hired 300,000 in a month and plans to hire 250,000 more. Curious. Slack, Twilio, Adobe, Google & Salesforce have increased job listings 20-40%. Facebook & Apple have been stable. https://www.cnbc.com/... Thanks: @mattrosoff
Context & Ripple Effects
This lands one month after crowdsourced Candor data showed 267 tech companies had already frozen hiring in late March, and weeks before Layoffs.fyi counted over 40,000 pandemic job cuts. The new wrinkle is that the drawdown is not uniform: analysts put the overall drop in openings at roughly 20% between mid-March and mid-April, but the damage concentrates in supply chain logistics and delivery.
The same dataset shows the mirror image inside tech itself — Grubhub has cut corporate listings by 94% this year while Instacart added 300,000 workers in a month with 250,000 more planned, and Slack, Twilio, Adobe, Google and Salesforce expanded listings 20-40% as Facebook and Apple held steady.
First-order effects
- Delivery and logistics employers are shedding white-collar roles fastest — Grubhub's 94% corporate-listing collapse means its hiring pipeline effectively shuts — while Instacart converts the same consumer shift into mass hourly fulfillment hiring.
- Collaboration and cloud vendors (Slack, Twilio, Adobe, Google, Salesforce) become the default destination for displaced candidates, gaining a 20-40% wider applicant pool at no extra sourcing cost.
Second-order effects
- Rivals without Instacart's balance sheet must compete for gig labor against a company adding half a million workers, pushing signing incentives and pay in warehouse and shopper roles up sector-wide.
- Facebook and Apple's stable listings sit alongside peers' expansion, so the contest for scarce engineers tightens around a handful of steady buyers while travel-exposed firms retreat.
Third-order effects
- The split between physically exposed and digitally exposed employers foreshadows the later cycle where 150,000 layoffs in 2022 coexisted with record tech occupation employment — openings and headcount decoupling as companies re-slice work by demand exposure.
- If each downturn redraws the hiring map along these lines, job listings become a real-time demand signal that recruiters and investors read weekly rather than an annual planning input.
The trend: Tech hiring is fragmenting into two markets — digital-demand employers expanding while physically exposed ones contract — so aggregate opening counts increasingly mask the real distribution.