Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) said it was looking to recruit workers who’ve been fired by technology companies such as Meta Platforms and Twitter to fill digital and engineering vacancies.
The luxury carmaker wants to hire about 800 workers across the UK, US, Ireland, India, China and Hungary, said JLR on Friday. The jobs are in areas including autonomous driving, artificial intelligence, electrification, cloud software, data science and machine learning, it added.
Tech companies are trimming staff and slowing hiring as they face higher interest rates and sluggish consumer spending, as well as a strong dollar. Facebook parent Meta is cutting about 11,000 jobs, the first big round of lay-offs in the social-media company’s history, while Twitter under new owner Elon Musk has imposed deep cuts and seen many of its workers quit.
JLR, owned by India’s Tata Motors, said the tech workers it is looking to recruit have skills that are essential to develop and build the carmaker’s next-generation of electric cars
Severance pay
Jaguars’s move came as Twitter continued to bleed engineers and other workers on Thursday after Mr Musk gave them a choice to pledge to “hardcore” work or resign with severance pay.
Musk's Twitter takeover troubles Irish regulators
Some took to Twitter to announce they were signing off after Mr Musk’s deadline to make the pledge.
A number of employees took to a private forum outside of the company’s messaging board to discuss their planned departure, asking questions about how it might jeopardise their US visas or if they would get the promised severance pay, according to an employee fired earlier this week who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.
While it is unclear how many of Twitter’s already-decimated staff took Mr Musk up on his offer, the newest round of departures means the platform is continuing to lose workers just as it is gearing up for the 2022 Fifa World Cup.
It is one of the busiest events on Twitter that can overwhelm its systems if things go haywire.
“To all the Tweeps who decided to make today your last day: thanks for being incredible teammates through the ups and downs. I can’t wait to see what you do next,” tweeted one employee, Esther Crawford, who is remaining at the company and has been working on the overhaul of the platform’s verification system.
Since taking over Twitter less than three weeks ago, Mr Musk has booted half of the company’s full-time staff of 7,500 and an untold number of contractors responsible for content moderation and other crucial efforts.
He fired top executives on his first day as Twitter’s owner, while others left voluntarily in the ensuing days. Earlier this week, he began firing a small group of engineers who took issue with him publicly or in the company’s internal Slack messaging system.
Then overnight on Wednesday, Mr Musk sent an email to the remaining staff at Twitter, saying that it is a software and servers company at its heart and he asked employees to decide by Thursday evening if they want to remain a part of the business.
‘Twitter 2.0′
Mr Musk wrote that employees “will need to be extremely hardcore” to build “a breakthrough Twitter 2.0″ and that long hours at high intensity will be needed for success. But in a Thursday email, he backpedalled on his insistence that everyone work from the office. His initial rejection of remote work alienated many employees who survived the lay-offs.
He softened his earlier tone in an email to employees, writing that “all that is required for approval is that your manager takes responsibility for ensuring you are making an excellent contribution”.
Workers would also be expected to have “in-person meetings with your colleagues on a reasonable cadence, ideally weekly, but not less than once per month”.
Twitter did not respond to a message seeking comment. — Bloomberg
