While industries such as hospitality, tourism and food service saw jobs cut left and right during 2020, some of the city’s public technology firms swelled with new employees.
As Peloton saw a spike in homebound Americans becoming paying customers last year, it also went on a hiring spree, adding more than 3,000 workers.
With a 110% increase, Peloton went to the front of the pack among the city’s publicly traded technology companies for headcount growth, reaching 5,862 employees globally as of Dec. 31, 2020, according to a Crain’s analysis of annual earnings reports of seven public New York technology firms.
The employment data in each company’s annual report offers a snapshot into how some of the local industry’s largest players expanded in 2020, as much of the overall economy contracted.
Six of the seven firms added to their headcounts, with only one, Casper Sleep, reporting a decrease. The employee totals compiled by Crain’s are focused on companies headquartered in New York—not including the tech giants with secondary offices here, such as Amazon, Google and Facebook.
Peloton, which is headquartered in Chelsea, employs people in several global cities, both in corporate roles and in retail locations. The company declined to share its exact headcount for New York, but about 40% of its current listed job openings are in the city.
Shari Eaton, a senior vice president at Peloton, said the company has focused its New York hiring on product development, technology and the content teams that produce its classes.
The SoHo-based insurer Lemonade was second among New York public tech companies analyzed by Crain’s . The firm, which launched an initial public offering, boosted its headcount to 567 by year’s end, doubling its total from the end of 2019. About 348 of those employees are in the U.S. with the rest focused in Israel.
Headcount climbed about 56% for cloud security firm Datadog, the city’s largest software company, as measured by its $25 billion market cap. The Midtown company employed 2,185 people as of Dec. 31, 2020.
About a third of Datadog’s employees are outside the U.S., according to its annual report. The largest percentage of those employees are in France, where Datadog was founded.
Crain’s also found that:
- Dumbo-based Etsy employed 1,414 at the end of 2020, up about 15% from the 2019 year-end total.
- Cloud database software company MongoDB, based in Midtown, employed 2,446 at the end of 2020, according to a company spokesman. That marks a 35% increase from its last reported total, in December 2019.
- The headcount at Blue Apron climbed about 25%, to 2,045. About 85% of those employees work in fulfillment centers in New Jersey and California.
Casper Sleep’s headcount of full-time employees was down about 25% by the end of 2020. The SoHo mattress company employed 442 people full time and 192 part time at the end of 2020, compared with 597 full time and 234 part time in December 2019.
Casper did not return a request for comment on the decreased headcount. The firm reportedly cut 78 corporate jobs in April while winding down its European operations.
The total number of New Yorkers working in the computer systems design and related services—the federal jobs category most closely associated with the tech industry—declined about 1% year over year as of December, according to an analysis by Moody’s. That’s an improvement on the city’s 6% decline in total employment.
Several companies slowed their pace of hiring in 2020 to focus only on critical roles, said Jovena Natal, CEO of the technology-focused recruiting firm Clutch Talent. Now there are signs that hiring has accelerated across large companies and startups in the early months of this year, particularly at companies approaching initial public offerings, such as Squarespace.
“Health tech is booming, especially companies that offer digital care,” Natal said. “We are seeing growth in blockchain. And nearly every venture capital-backed tech company is adding to their headcount, some quite aggressively.”
SOURCE: Section Page News – Crain’s New York Business – Read entire story here.