Uber Technologies announced on Wednesday its plans to reduce its recruitment division by cutting 200 jobs in an effort to streamline costs and maintain a flat staff count throughout the year.
These job cuts represent less than 1 percent of Uber’s global workforce of 32,700 employees. Earlier this year, the company also laid off 150 employees in its freight services division. The reduction in the recruitment team corresponds to around 35 percent of Uber’s recruiting staff.
This move follows Uber’s previous staff reduction of 17 percent at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. In comparison, Uber’s main competitor, Lyft, under the leadership of new CEO David Risher, laid off approximately 26 percent of its workforce in April and around 700 employees late last year.
Lyft has been striving to protect its margins and increase market share in the face of competition from Uber. In May, Uber announced that it was on track to achieve operating income profitability in the current year and that it intended to maintain a steady workforce count after experiencing sequential declines in the first quarter of the year.
