Salesforce CEO and co-founder Marc Benioff announced the company will be hiring 4,000 new employees in the next six months and 12,000 in the next year. 

The development comes on account of the fact that since the COVID-19 outbreak that has forced people to stay and work from home, the company’s online business software that supports remote work and ecommerce has seen significant demand.

In August, the cloud-based customer management software company announced that, at the end of the month, they would be making 1,000 job cuts. At the time of the earlier announced reductions, Salesforce employed around 54,000 people worldwide and the layoffs accounted for almost 2% of their total workforce. With the addition of 12,000 jobs, Salesforce will employ 65,000 people within the year.

Salesforce also revealed large second-quarter earnings, tracking $5.15Bn in revenue at a 29% growth rate, exceeding Wall Street predictions of $4.87Bn. “Join our 54K employee strong Ohana defining the future of software," Benioff tweeted. "Salesforce is the world's fastest-growing Top 5 enterprise software company.” 

Like many companies, Salesforce had flagged the possibility of slower revenue growth earlier in the pandemic as their customers navigated economic difficulty and struggled to pay their bills. However, this latest revenue growth is better than expected. Among their many solutions, Salesforce offerings include software that supports ecommerce and remote work, so it comes as no surprise that their business has seen a significant uptick since the pandemic began. 

With this latest announcement, Salesforce is setting the tone for an ambitious, quickly-expanding era in the company’s development. The company did not immediately respond to a request for additional details on the hiring, hence it remains to be seen exactly what form these new roles will take.