AFriendlyBeagle

Increasing interest rates can discourage investment by making it more expensive to borrow money, and by increasing the yield of savings relative to available investment targets.

Corporations seeking investment in this climate might try to attract it by increasing the expected return on investment, which would involve committing fewer resources or achieving greater returns - being more efficient.

Labour costs are typically one of the main outgoings for a corporation, and so they might try to increase their rate of return by eliminating positions which are considered to be producing too few returns.

The Federal Reserve might want this because they believe (erroneously, in my view) that high employment is the main contributing factor for inflationary pressure.