Samwise High Tech Recruiting Newsletter
Thursday, June 11, 2026
Salesforce Files WARN Notice for 86 Positions in Third Layoff Round Since September
Salesforce issued a new California WARN notice covering 86 positions across MuleSoft, Marketing Cloud, and roles adjacent to its Agentforce AI platform, its third round of layoffs in nine months. The cuts arrive despite Agentforce surpassing $1.2 billion in annual recurring revenue, underscoring the widening gap between AI-driven product performance and workforce stability. CEO Marc Benioff has confirmed that engineering headcount is frozen while only sales positions continue to expand. The pattern — generating AI revenue while eliminating the human roles connected to those products — signals a structural shift in how Salesforce is reallocating its workforce investment.
Sources: Eastern Herald, American Bazaar, Inc.
DOL Formally Rescinds 2024 Overtime Rule, Restoring $684 Weekly Salary Threshold
The Department of Labor formally rescinded its 2024 overtime rule, restoring the federal salary threshold for overtime exemptions to $684 per week — the level set in 2019 — following federal court decisions that struck down the rule’s phased increases. Employers who reclassified workers or raised salaries to comply face real exposure: reversing those changes inconsistently creates litigation risk, according to Holland & Hart attorney Adam Bouka, who advises treating any reversal as a fresh exemption review rather than a simple undo. State law does not reset; California, New York, and Washington maintain higher thresholds that multi-state employers must still honor.
Sources: HR Executive
AI in HR Is Repeating Old Integration Errors as Buyers Skip Infrastructure, Phenom VP Warns
HR technology buyers are purchasing AI agents — fraud detection, voice automation, candidate screening — before building the data structures, CRM architecture, and workflow consistency those tools require, writes Maggie Allen of Phenom in HR Executive. The pattern echoes the integration failures of the last decade, with fragmented point solutions replacing seamless experiences. A Society for Human Resource Management study found 70 percent of HR leaders using AI report challenges including privacy concerns, employee resistance, and difficulty auditing algorithms. Allen recommends mapping existing workflows before buying, piloting narrow use cases first, and relying on industry conferences rather than vendor hype to evaluate options.
Sources: HR Executive
Marsh-Mercer Report: Leadership Failures Are the Top Driver of Workforce Risk Across 26 Markets
A Marsh and Mercer People Risk 2026 report, based on responses from 4,517 HR and risk professionals across 26 markets, found that inadequate leadership skills trigger or worsen more downstream workforce risks than any other single factor surveyed — including mental health deterioration, labor shortages, and poor AI adoption. The share of employees who say they are thriving at work fell from 66 percent in 2022 to 44 percent in 2026. Only 14 percent of organizations surveyed have achieved what Marsh calls transformative risk maturity; those organizations outperform peers by an average of 15 percentage points on talent-related risk mitigation.
Sources: HR Executive
Tech Sector Shed 4,375 Workers in Week Ending June 10 as 2026 Toll Nears 184,000
At least 4,375 U.S. tech workers were laid off or scheduled for elimination in the week ending June 10, 2026, according to InformationWeek’s ongoing workforce tracker, pushing the year-to-date total to 183,966 workers across 247 confirmed events. Separately, layoff aggregator TrueUp projects the sector could shed as many as 370,000 U.S. tech workers in 2026 — a figure that would significantly exceed totals recorded in both 2024 and 2025 combined. More than 20,000 tech workers have been cut in every month of 2026 except April, according to TrueUp’s running tally of confirmed workforce reductions.
Sources: InformationWeek, TrueUp
Curated by JD · samwise.agency
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