Tableau said it will add between 500 and 600 employees this year, changing its previous plans of hiring 1,000 people.
Tableau’s stock dropped 11.3 percent Friday, after the company reported earnings Thursday that beat analyst expectations but continued to concern investors.
The stock closed Friday at $45.21, down $5.77.
The business intelligence company, which has been expanding rapidly in Kirkland and in Seattle’s Fremont neighborhood, is sharply trimming its hiring plans.
The company said earlier this year it planned to add 1,000 new employees during 2016, including 600 in the Puget Sound region.
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That number has been cut to about 500 or 600 new employees throughout the year, executives said on a conference call with analysts Thursday.
Slowing hiring will give the company time to make sure its sales staff is fully trained, Chief Financial Officer Tom Walker said.
“We also made the decision to moderate hiring,” Walker said. “We’ve got a lot of talented people here, and we’ve got to make sure that they are really focused and be able to execute the levels that we want.”
Tableau’s stock dropped by 50 percent after its fourth-quarter earnings in February, when the company’s results beat expectations but showed license revenue growth had slowed. Tableau brings in license revenue when companies sign up or expand subscriptions to its data-visualization products.
License revenue slowed again during the first quarter, causing investors to grow wary of Tableau’s growth.
The company attributed the slowdown to macroeconomic trends, increased competition in the market and a sales staff that had been growing so quickly that many were not fully trained.