(2025-02-28) Procopio Big Hr Gets Hit With Big Job Cuts

Joe Procopio: “Big HR” Gets Hit With Big Job Cuts. Workday announces its own mass layoffs, so what does that mean for the tech industry?

the roughly 2,000 former employees of Big HR SaaS provider Workday.

To get into the reasons for the Workday job cuts, let’s grab a quote from the announcement article....

Workday is the single biggest irritant in the hiring process — just ask anyone who has ever had to create a separate account for every job application they wanted to submit.

While there have been spotty job cuts in HR tech, and while internal HR talent has been overly targeted in this general mass layoff cycle, due to misguided expectations of what AI can accomplish in the hiring process, those two streams only now just crossed like in Ghostbusters.

Workday CEO Carl Eschenbach told employees in a memo that the company needs a new approach in the current market and does plan to hire AI talent.”

The first thing the CEO said is more important than name-dropping AI at the end.

Anyway, the part to look at again is the “company needs a new approach in the current market.”

let me just go maximum snark here and say that the “new approach,” at this point in time, should be the removal of “Big HR” tech from the hiring process. Completely. It’s too late to save it. It’s broken beyond repair.

You don’t need to spend a year researching broken hiring to figure out their next move.
They’re already telling you. It’s “AI.”

*With quotes around it for a reason.

It’s because the CEO is looking to hire “AI talent” into a company that’s already calling itself an “AI platform.”
More quotes, because that statement could apply to any CEO of any company these days.*

*I’ll bet that Workday — and in fact every single “Big HR” tech company — they’re all going to go face-first into AI solutions, quickly and incorrectly implemented, around the edges of the problem, and thus make it worse.

Good.

Let them do that.*

the more Band-Aids they put on the real problem, the better the chances of an innovator coming in and sweeping the whole floor out from under “Big HR” tech.