Siemiatkowski: Klarna froze hiring to shrink headcount via attrition and boost pay
Sebastian Siemiatkowski · Inside Klarna's IPO CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski · Sourcery with Molly O'Shea · Sep 12, 2025 · at 22:16
Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski explains Klarna's workforce restructuring strategy, relying on natural turnover rather than layoffs while redistributing savings to existing staff.
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“So we stopped recruiting at Klana about two years ago. And the idea was that what we're going to do is if people on average stay five years at Klana, that means 20% resign every year. It's typical, kind of typical attrition rate for a tech company. If we don't hire, that means they will shrink. And that, that way of, we don't have to do layoffs but we can automatically just become more efficient, right? And the benefit also is that we said to all our employees that like, because payroll will shrink a total, we will be fewer people. We will take some of the economical benefits of that and put it back in accelerating your compensation. So a lot of people are not working on the last one or two years have seen an acceleration in their compensation because we just have more money to spend on them. So not all of the economical benefits, but a large part of it has come back to our employees.”
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