With the coronavirus pandemic crashing the global economy, more and more companies are folding up or having mass layoffs. And it seems some job roles are hit harder.
This week alone, four companies were said to have massive cuts of employees, including TripAdvisor, Lyft, Juul, and Uber. Thousands of employees are affected by these occurrences.
Residents wait in line for free groceries distributed by the Salvation Army food pantry, which reports an increase from an average of 60 meals to 500 meals per day given out at the facility, amid the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak in Lynn, Massachusetts, U.S., May 4, 2020.
However, it appears that layoffs are directly affecting certain jobs, Tech Crunch reported. According to data tracker Layoffs.fyi, certain job roles are more affected than others.
Sales and customer-facing roles, engineering, and operations roles are the most affected by post-coronavirus downsizing.
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Sales and Marketing
Toast, a restaurant tech startup, laid off half of its workforce earlier this month. About 70% of these employees were in sales or customer success roles. Similarly, Yelp's layoffs earlier this year show that 67% of employees who were dropped have similar job roles as those with Toast's.
A week later, another startup has folded up. Carta, an equity management company, laid off people as well, and about 47% of the cuts were in the sales or customer success roles.
It is easy to grasp why sales and marketing are hard hit. Of course, these functions to serve a healthy market, which is not available at this time.
Due to the shutdown of businesses during the COVID-19 pandemic, it is much harder to make a sale compared to pre-COVID time. This is because people might not be spending much as they normally would have. Also, most of these roles are based in satellite offices, which no longer operate as the staff is scaled down.
However, the layoff does not merely impact sales. In some companies, layoffs are affecting all departments. This is the case for Carta.
"As those departments become smaller, many of the teams that support those departments like recruiting, HR, operations, and parts of R&D, have to downsize with them," Carta CEO Henry Ward wrote in a Medium post.
"Even though the analysis starts with customers, it quickly starts affecting all parts of the organization. This makes sense. We exist only because our customers exist and allow us to serve them. And when our customers suffer, we suffer too," he adds.
Engineers are also unsafe
Despite their prominence, engineers are not invincible during these hard times. Historically, engineers land high, according to the report. This compares competitive salaries versus sales roles, which largely are based on commission. This sometimes means that a company is trying to dial back costs needs to look at the highest-paid roles and slim accordingly.
This is the case for Groupon where the majority of positions that were cut are engineering roles based on the Layoffs.fyi study. Meanwhile, Operations roles were also among the most cut for companies like Ritual and Turo.
Highest unemployment rate
Last week, The Guardian reported that the United Stateshads recorded another 3.8 million people who lost jobs, bringing the total number of unemployed Americans to over 30 million as of Thursday.
The number is still growing as the world continues to struggle against the health crisis, which is affecting the economy and social development as well.
The commerce department announced that for the first quarter, the US economy fell by 4.8%, its steepest drop since the last recession. It also ends the decade of the generally constant growth of the economy.
However, President Donald Trump's senior economic adviser Kevin Hassett has warned that the US unemployment rate could spike to between 16% and 20% by June. So, unless a drastic change is made, it seems the worse is yet to come.
