A woman throws her graduation mortar board cap in the air as she poses for her photographer in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., U.S.

U.S. tech companies yank job offers, leaving college grads scrambling

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2022-06-22 11:00:09

A woman throws her graduation mortar board cap in the air as she poses for her photographer in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., U.S. April 30, 2019. REUTERS/Clodagh Kilcoyne/File Photo

June 22 (Reuters) - One by one, over the last week of May, Twitter Inc (TWTR.N) rang up some members of its incoming class of new hires who had recently graduated from college and revoked the job offers in 15-minute calls, according to some of the recipients.

“It was traumatic,” Iris Guo, an incoming associate product manager living in Toronto, told Reuters. She received the bad news in a 10:45 p.m. video call that her position had been eliminated. Since then, she has raced to find new employment in order to secure her U.S. work visa.

More than 21,500 tech workers in the United States have lost their jobs so far this year, according to Layoffs.fyi, a website that monitors job cuts. The number of tech layoffs in May alone skyrocketed 780% over the first four months of the year combined, according to outplacement services firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

But recent college graduates like Guo, who graduated from the University of Waterloo and studied financial management and computer science, represent a new dimension to the cutbacks as their nascent careers are eliminated even before they begin. The trend reflects a new austerity sweeping across some parts of the tech industry such as crypto and venture capital-backed companies.