Six months after the ax fell on hundreds of workers at Target Corp. headquarters, the company's technology operations finally felt the effect of its downsizing, with 235 people in the Twin Cities told they were out of a job Tuesday.
The retailer's information technology units were spared in earlier rounds of layoffs as the senior executives in charge of them were in flux.
In addition to the new job cuts, Target said Tuesday it will close about 35 open positions at its corporate offices in Minneapolis and Brooklyn Park. Target laid off 40 people at its IT center in India, where it employs about 2,600 people.
At first glance, the new round of cuts appeared at odds with the emphasis that Target has placed on catching up to the digital skills of other companies, particularly Amazon.com Inc. Indeed, the company's website on Tuesday listed 102 job openings in information technology, with most of them being for engineers. Those jobs were posted earlier this summer.
But Target spokeswoman Molly Snyder said those openings are different from the jobs that were eliminated, which were mostly in areas such as business analysis and project management.
Adam Hoffarber, managing director for Twin Cities recruiting firm SkyWater Search Partners, said the laid-off workers appear to have been more involved in operations and infrastructure, mid-level management jobs that can be more easily shifted to other groups within the company.
"The actual engineers doing the coding — they really need those kind of people," he said.
As with the previous waves of Target layoffs, Hoffarber expects those who lost their jobs on Tuesday to be able to land new ones fairly quickly. Another factor in their favor is that IT is one of the hottest job sectors in the region right now.
