Verizon Communications Inc. ($VZ) announced that 10,400 employees will leave the company over the next seven months after accepting buyout offers. As part of a planned corporate downsizing effort (and to prepare for 5G rollout, reportedly), Verizon offered buyouts to 44,000 employees. It's the latest U.S. company to make deep cuts this year after General Motors ($GM) dropped its own layoffs just over two weeks ago.
Although Verizon revealed its cost-cutting plan last year, outsiders were uncertain about when cuts would come. Trends gathered from Verizon's official careers site and LinkedIn profile provide some interesting foreshadowing to the downsizing.
A downward trend in hiring emerged from August 31 to today. Back on August 31, there were 2,976 job openings at Verizon. Today, there are 1,848, a decrease of 37.9%.
As with General Motors and Vice ($PRIVATE:VICEMEDIA), the number of job listings at Verizon were on a decline months before it announced a cut in its workforce.
At the same time as Verizon's overall job listing cut, Verizon's media subsidiary Oath also slowed its hiring efforts where listings decreased by 35.9% from August 31 to today.
Verizon's LinkedIn growth slows
On LinkedIn, fewer people have been listing Verizon as an employer.
What used to be wild swings in the number of profiles claiming that they work for Verizon — decreases usually means the purging of fake or phantom accounts — have now become much calmer rises in employee count.
As 2019 approaches and Verizon employees who accepted buyouts are set to leave in either March or June, we'll keep track of what happens with one of the largest telecommunication companies in the world.