Slack goes on first hiring spree since it went public, with focus on Product Engineers

This article first appeared at Thinknum Media here.

To see the data referenced in this story, request access here.

Slack ($NYSE:WORK) has had an active 24 hours both on and off Wall Street. After a Business Insider story reported that Slack signed a massive deal with IBM that would send 350,000 employees to the workplace chat app, Slack's stock went on such a run that trading was halted as the market waited for confirmation of the news.

It turned out that this wasn't news: Slack released an SEC filing that noted IBM was already a client, and that 350,000 new seats hadn't been sold.

Investors and analysts were understandably disappointed, and Slack's future was once again — rationally or not — called into question.

But Slack may still have something up its sleeve, as recent hiring trends show that the company is on a bit of a hiring spree for future product development.

As of this week, Slack has opened 210 positions, up from just 163 in the new year. This is the first uptick in hiring for the company since it went public last summer.

The hiring uptick appears to be focused on bringing in new Product Engineering talent.

In the past quarter, Product Engineering moved from the fifth most in-demand job category at Slack to its first, outpacing Customer Success Marketing for the first time since at least 2018.

The new category, called "120 Product Engineering" on Slack's own recruiting website, first appeared in October 2019, post-DPO. But it was in mid-December that the company ramped up hiring for the division.

The jobs are diverse: Enterprise, Frontend, Machine Learning, even Expansion Adoption, and totaled 32 unique positions since October.

About the Data:

Thinknum tracks companies using the information they post online - jobs, social and web traffic, product sales and app ratings - and creates data sets that measure factors like hiring, revenue and foot traffic. Data sets may not be fully comprehensive (they only account for what is available on the web), but they can be used to gauge performance factors like staffing and sales. 

Further Reading: 

• Hiring at Slack has slowed 33% since DPO, but it's not all bad
• Slack's users are happy - shareholders are not - and that could change soon
• Slack must fight off an army of workforce management unicorns

If you'd like to see the data referenced in this article, request access here.