Not exactly. In December 2024, Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski said the company had stopped hiring about a year earlier, but Klarna clarified that it was still filling selected essential roles, mainly in engineering. At the time, TechCrunch counted more than 50 roles on the company’s careers page. The distinction was between hiring to grow the overall workforce and backfilling particular vacancies—not between hiring and no hiring at all.
What Klarna’s CEO said—and what the company clarified
In a December 2024 Bloomberg TV interview, CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski said, “We stopped hiring about a year ago. We were 4,500, now we’re 3,500.” He attributed the lower headcount to natural attrition and not hiring, according to TechCrunch’s report.
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TechCrunch also found more than 50 roles listed globally on Klarna’s careers page. The company’s global press lead, John Craske, said the CEO had been “simplifying for brevity in a broadcast interview.” Craske explained that Klarna was “not actively recruiting to expand the workforce” but was “only backfilling some essential roles, predominantly engineering.” He said the company had hired between 1,000 and 1,500 people annually from 2019 to 2022.
That explanation reconciles the statements: a company can restrain expansion hiring while still advertising selected jobs to replace departures or fill roles it considers essential. A listing count alone does not reveal how many people Klarna planned to hire, whether every listing represented an active requisition, or whether the company’s total headcount would rise or fall.
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What the AI and staffing figures do—and do not—show
In a March 2024 CBS News interview, Siemiatkowski said Klarna’s AI customer-service system was doing the equivalent work of about 700 full-time agents. He clarified that those service agents were outsourced, not Klarna employees. The figure is therefore an estimate of outsourced agent work, not evidence that Klarna laid off 700 employees.
The CEO also made a broad claim in December 2024: “I am of the opinion that AI can already do all of the jobs that we as humans do.” That is his view, not an independently verified measure of which jobs AI could perform or how the technology affected Klarna’s total staffing.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.What Klarna said about people and AI in 2025
In June 2025, Siemiatkowski said Klarna would use AI to take away manual work while preserving a human connection in customer service. He described human service as a VIP offering: “We think offering human customer service is always going to be a VIP thing.” TechCrunch reported his estimate that Klarna had about 3,000 workers at that time. These later comments describe the CEO’s stated approach and estimate; they do not establish Klarna’s staffing or hiring policy today.
How to read the “stopped hiring” claim
- Date the statement: The CEO’s “stopped hiring” remark and TechCrunch’s count of more than 50 listed roles refer to December 2024.
- Separate growth from backfilling: Klarna’s spokesperson said the company was not recruiting to expand its workforce but was still replacing people in selected essential roles.
- Don’t treat listings as hires: Advertised roles are not a count of completed hires, net workforce growth, or necessarily active requisitions.
- Keep the AI estimate in scope: The roughly 700-agent figure concerned outsourced customer-service work, according to the CEO, not Klarna employees dismissed.
The available figures and statements do not establish how many vacancies Klarna has now or what its hiring policy is on October 8, 2026. The December 2024 episode is best described as a broad restraint on expansion hiring with selective exceptions, rather than a literal end to all recruitment.
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