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Back to the office: Workday hiring 20% more Workdayers in anticipation of postponed projects opening up

The desk and chain awaits those extra 2,500 people... the lucky blighters

SaaSy HR and finance vendor Workday says it's hiring 2,500 people to drill into a well of overdue projects as more organisations eye up a potential return to the place where dreams are made: the office.

Talking to financial analysts on a conference call to discuss results for Workday's Q1 of fiscal 2022 ended 30 April, Co-CEO Aneel Bhusri said: "We plan to increase our global workforce by more than 20 per cent."

He said there was a "significant global opportunity in front of us as companies continue to embark on their HR and finance transformation journeys."

The other half of the Workday CEO double act, Chano Fernandez, said the big focus will be on bringing in sales people. He said C-level biz execs had "prioritised employee engagements and back to work and ... the HR offering. But right now, we are seeing as well how they start to reconsider. And there is some sort of pent-up demand, I would say, in terms of overdue projects on the office of the CFO."

Reg readers may remember that Workday's Bhusri is himself keen on getting staff back into the office, saying in January that spending five-days a week working at home was "perhaps... too much family time".

The company later backed this up by spending $172.5m on a new building on the eastern side of San Francisco Bay - at a time when other companies see flexible and home working as a permanent change resulting from the pandemic.

On the conference call, Fernandez said a proportion of the recruitment will be outside of the US as the market is "recovering and opening up after the COVID kind of headwind".

Some 75 per cent of Workday's $1.18bn in Q1 revenue - up 15 per cent year-on-year - was transacted with customers stateside.

Subscription revenue, the bulk of the company’s turnover, was $1.03bn, an increase of 17 per cent from a year earlier. Professional sevices made up the rest. Operating loss was $38.3m.

The 16-year-old company made an operating loss of $144.5m in the same period in 2020. Workday’s share price dropped 1.8 per cent on Nasdaq after hours, following a rise of 0.2 per cent during yesterday.

Robynne Sisco, president and chief financial officer, said some of the cost savings the company is making during the coronavirus pandemic will start to abate as economies open up.

“We still are getting some COVID-related benefits in our expenses this year, particularly from travel as well as office-related expenses and the lull in the hiring we saw last year. So, we expect savings to significantly moderate as we get into the back half of the year,” she said.

But Bhusri confidently predicted these costs will come as its sales pipeline ramps up with industries, including airlines and travel companies “looking forward to the future,” he told analysts. ®

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