Palantir is proud of its ‘disciplined’ hiring practices

• Palantir CEO Alex Karp touted a “disciplined” hiring practice amid tech layoffs.
• Tech giants like Microsoft and Amazon are laying off a large number of workers.
• Economic uncertainty is growing with missed hiring expectations and a government shutdown.

Palantir is proud of its “disciplined” hiring practices.

The defense tech company reported earnings that beat estimates on Monday, and CEO Alex Karp touted Palantir’s approach to talent recruitment in his shareholder letter.

Karp notes that while the company has “grown quite significantly,” it has kept to its “constraints.”

“Our head count is one manifestation of this disciplined approach,” Karp wrote in the letter to shareholders. “The casual expansion of our ranks would have diminished the need to lean even more heavily on the strength of our software and the Ontology and to ensure their continued maturation.

“The alternative would have been to rely on an army of bright minds to do work that would have obscured the platform’s weaknesses and ultimately hindered its development,” Karp added.

The message of maintaining a lean head count arrives at a moment when other companies are pivoting to leaner workforces. There have been significant layoffs at multiple large companies, particularly in middle-management roles.

Throughout the year, Microsoft has laid off around 15,000 employees in total with multiple rounds of cuts. In October, Amazon announced it is cutting about 14,000 corporate jobs, or roughly 4% of its white-collar workforce, as part of an effort to streamline operations and reduce bureaucracy. Target, the retail giant, also announced in the same month that it would lay off 1,000 corporate employees to eliminate what the company called “overlapping work.”

During Amazon’s latest earnings call, CEO Andy Jassy said that the company’s rapid growth in recent years created “a lot more layers” that have slowed decision-making, and that the layoff is about “culture” instead of cost cutting or AI.

To make the job market picture more unclear, the government shutdown is preventing the release of job data from September onwards. Based on the most recent available data from August, the labor market missed expectations by a wide margin.