Originally reported by Cloud Wars (cloudwars.co), April 2020. This article summarizes and expands on ServiceNow’s workforce commitments made during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic.
ServiceNow Takes a Stand: No Layoffs, More Hiring
At a time when layoffs were sweeping across nearly every industry, ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott made a public commitment in April 2020 to protect his company’s workforce — and go further by actively expanding it. In a press release issued in April 2020, McDermott stated that ServiceNow would not conduct any COVID-19-triggered layoffs during the year and would instead hire more than 1,000 net new employees in the United States alone, with additional hiring planned globally.
“We want our employees focused on supporting our customers, not worried about their own jobs. Keeping our company strong means we can help our customers succeed. Supporting our customers, we can help get the U.S. and global economy working again.”
— Bill McDermott, CEO, ServiceNow
McDermott described the company as “grateful to be in this position” — an acknowledgment that not every enterprise software vendor had the financial stability to make similar commitments during an unprecedented global health and economic crisis.
Context: ServiceNow’s Financial Position Heading Into 2020
Before the pandemic took hold, ServiceNow had been on a strong growth trajectory. With more than 11,000 employees worldwide, the company was widely expected to post its first-ever billion-dollar quarter in Q1 2020 and was on track to surpass $4 billion in annual revenue for the full calendar year. Those milestones had been within reach, making ServiceNow one of the cloud industry’s standout performers heading into the year.
However, like most enterprise technology vendors, ServiceNow found its near-term financial outlook complicated by the sweeping economic disruption caused by COVID-19. McDermott and the company were preparing to release Q1 2020 financials on April 29, 2020, with analysts and investors watching closely to see how the crisis was affecting demand for digital workflow solutions.
What the Hiring Commitment Signals
Committing to hire more than 1,000 new employees during a global recession is not a decision made lightly. From a strategic standpoint, this kind of forward investment typically signals several things:
- Confidence in demand: ServiceNow’s digital workflow and IT service management (ITSM) platform is designed to automate and streamline enterprise operations — capabilities that become more, not less, relevant during periods of disruption and remote work adoption.
- Customer success focus: Growing headcount in sales, support, and professional services roles helps ensure that existing customers receive the attention they need during challenging times, which in turn reduces churn.
- Talent opportunity: Economic downturns often free up high-quality talent. Companies with strong balance sheets can attract skilled engineers, consultants, and sales professionals who might otherwise be unavailable.
ServiceNow confirmed in its press release that it had “continued to hire and onboard new employees throughout the COVID-19 pandemic,” suggesting the hiring plan was already in motion rather than being a future aspiration.
ServiceNow’s Broader COVID-19 Response
The hiring commitment was part of a larger response from ServiceNow to the pandemic. Earlier in the crisis, the company released four emergency-response applications — developed in partnership with ecosystem partners — at no cost to public-sector organizations and businesses. These apps were designed to help organizations manage the surge in emergency-response and workforce safety requirements that arose rapidly in early 2020.
According to reporting from Cloud Wars, approximately 1,000 organizations had adopted these four emergency-response apps shortly after they were made available. The rapid uptake underscored the immediate operational value ServiceNow’s platform could provide during a crisis, as organizations scrambled to manage employee health tracking, remote work provisioning, and emergency communications at scale.
Why This Matters for the DevOps and Enterprise Tech Community
For DevOps engineers, platform architects, and IT leaders, ServiceNow’s response during COVID-19 illustrated a few broader points worth noting:
- Workflow automation as resilience infrastructure: Platforms that automate IT workflows, incident management, and change management proved critical as remote work created new operational stresses on IT departments. Organizations already running mature ITSM platforms were better positioned to adapt.
- Vendor stability matters: During a crisis, the financial health and stability of your SaaS vendors becomes a real concern. ServiceNow’s ability to pledge no layoffs while expanding headcount was a signal of platform longevity that enterprise customers take seriously.
- Ecosystem agility: The rapid development and deployment of free COVID-19 response apps — built with partners — demonstrated how a mature platform ecosystem can mobilize quickly to address emergent needs.
Looking Ahead
As of April 2020, ServiceNow held the number-nine position on the Cloud Wars Top 10 ranking of cloud vendors. McDermott had been laying the groundwork for an ambitious expansion of ServiceNow’s market position and product vision before the pandemic interrupted those plans. Whether the company would be able to resume that trajectory — or whether the economic headwinds of 2020 would force a more conservative posture — remained to be seen at the time of this reporting.
What was clear, however, was that ServiceNow was betting on continued demand for digital workflow automation, and it was willing to back that bet with concrete investment in people during one of the most uncertain periods in modern economic history.
Source: Cloud Wars (cloudwars.co). Original reporting by Cloud Wars staff, April 2020. This post is based on information available as of April 18, 2020 and reflects the situation as it stood at that time.