Google held another round of layoffs on Wednesday and told its recruiters that hundreds of them would lose their jobs by the end of the day, three of the people said.
Google’s recruiting arm, which at one time had more than 3,000 employees, has already been hit hard by layoffs this year.
The cuts are signs that Google and its parent company, Alphabet, will continue the belt-tightening that began at the Silicon Valley company this year, even as it doubles down on investments in artificial intelligence.
According to a post on an internal Google messaging board seen by The New York Times, recruiters and relevant staff members had previously been “invited to last-minute all-hands meetings with agendas to share hard news.” Brian Ong, vice president of recruiting, told employees that he wanted them to hear the news from him and that if he was in the office, they could finish work from home or go home, one of the people said.
Google spokesperson Courtney Mencini said in a statement, “We’ve made the tough decision to downsize our recruiting team,” as the company’s volume of requests for recruiters has decreased.
“As we’ve said, we continue to invest in top engineering and technical talent while also meaningfully slowing our overall hiring pace,” she added. Aspects of the cuts were previously reported by the news site Semaphore.
The cuts are not believed to be part of a larger layoff, but other parts of the company may also decide to cut positions.
For more than a year, Google Chief Executive Sundar Pichai has rallied employees in an effort to cut costs and increase productivity. In January, Google followed peers like Amazon and Meta and announced it was cutting 12,000 jobs, or 6 percent of its workforce, in the first significant layoffs in the company’s history. The company has 181,798 employees as of June 30.
Mr Pichai was criticized by current and former employees for how he handled the latest layoffs – announcing them in the middle of the night and immediately revoking employees’ corporate access. The cuts also overlapped with broader concerns about what the success of AI rivals such as OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, and its partner, Microsoft, could mean for Google’s business.
In the months since its earlier layoffs, Google has tried to focus on building and releasing its own AI to compete with rivals, updating most of its products to include the technology and introducing a chatbot, Bard. The new type of AI is very expensive to develop and operate, and the company has told investors it will find ways to offset the cost of their investment.
Ruth Porat, Alphabet’s president and chief investment officer, told financial analysts in July that the company is focusing on “re-engineering our cost base to create capacity for investment,” or making sure money is spent on the right things. compensation