Oracle's recent personnel shake-up goes deeper than layoffs, Insider has learned.
Hiring managers across the company have been asked to push back start dates for new recruits, according to two sources within Oracle's recruiting division. More broadly, hiring has been slashed or significantly slowed down across several business units, according to conversations with several company insiders.
At the same time, some units that are currently able to hire for backfilled positions and roles deemed critical have been instructed to avoid top talent markets like San Francisco and Seattle in favor of candidates from areas where they can command lower salaries, according to the sources and another recruiter with direct knowledge of the matter.
"Leadership refuses to step in and they refuse to hire more people and invest in talent. They aren't doing enough to talk about the elephant in the room, so a lot of teams are losing a lot of talented engineers," an Oracle engineer told Insider.
The changes to Oracle's strategy comes at a tumultuous time for the company: In June, the company closed its $28.3 billion acquisition of the healthcare-tech giant Cerner, and not long after, the Information reported that Oracle is seeking to cut costs by as much as $1 billion. The company then laid off hundreds of workers in August, leaving its marketing department gutted, and more recently laid off 201 workers at its Silicon Valley office earlier this month.
"They just spent a lot of money on Cerner — somewhere along the way they need to tighten the belt to recoup," an Oracle recruiter told Insider.
The hiring restrictions have been anything but straightforward, affecting teams differently with little clarification or transparency from executive leadership. Employees say contradictions, lack of communication, and unevenly applied hiring restrictions have made the already demoralized workforce even more confused and burned out, as leadership adds more red tape to filling roles left vacant by former colleagues.
"On a high level, no one will tell us if there's an official freeze," said an employee within Oracle's cloud software organization — a sentiment that was echoed by other Oracle workers who spoke to Insider. Many also expressed concern that the hiring changes mean another round of layoffs is looming.
The employees requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak with the press, but their identities are known to Insider.
Hiring at Oracle has cooled even if it isn't frozen, employees say
Employees across several of Oracle's business units told Insider that hiring in their departments has either stopped or significantly slowed down in the company's second quarter of its current fiscal year, which began on September 1.
Earlier this month, all outstanding offers were frozen and put under review, according to two people with direct knowledge of the matter. Hiring managers were asked to move start dates for new hires to the beginning of Oracle's third quarter, which starts on December 1, according to those two people and a third source in Oracle's recruiting division.
Meanwhile, any hiring that is allowed to move forward is facing new budget restrictions that are unusual for the company, even given what those employees describe as Oracle's frugal philosophies around recruiting.
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, Oracle's cloud platform and an Amazon Web Services competitor, is one of the units that's retained the ability to hire for roles deemed critical. But while the unit has previously been one where the company has invested heavily and offered the biggest salaries, hiring managers and recruiters are being asked to favor candidates in areas with lower costs of living, both in the US and abroad.
In the OCI unit in particular, Oracle is making a concerted effort to shift hiring away from expensive cities like San Francisco, Seattle, and New York, according to three people with knowledge of Oracle's hiring practices. Other open roles have shifted abroad, primarily to Eastern Europe, according to an OCI recruiter who said the strategy makes it possible to hire three developers for the price of one.
"Salaries are too high, and so we're looking in other areas where salaries and cost of living are lower," they said.
The company's security department is another unit with new location-based restrictions. Hiring managers are being asked to backfill roles that were once US-based with hires from Mexico or India, according to two software managers.
Conflicting messages are worsening sense of layoff doom
Employees tell Insider that the company's messaging around hiring has been confusing, exacerbating an already frustrating situation.
An employee in Oracle's cloud software unit described a September all-hands meeting in which a colleague asked one of the company's senior vice presidents to address the rumored hiring freeze. The SVP denied the hiring freeze, but when the employee asked their manager directly, even after the SVP's comments, they were told that there was indeed a hiring freeze in place in that unit.
One engineer who works for Cerner told Insider that mass layoffs and vacant roles have pushed many teammates to find roles elsewhere in the tech sector, worsening what he said was already high turnover.
When he asked his hiring manager to fill empty roles because of how "short-staffed" his unit was, his manager told him that hiring would be pushed off as far as January of next year.
"Attrition was so high after the layoffs because a lot of people decided to just voluntarily leave," the Cerner engineer said.
Oracle did not respond to requests for comment.
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