Google layoffs hit hundreds on recruiting team as company 'meaningfully' slows hiring

Tech giant is cutting jobs within its recruiting organisation, according to reports confirmed by Google to CRN

Tech giant Google is reportedly cutting hundreds of jobs within its recruiting organisation as the company pulls back on hiring.

"We continue to invest in top engineering and technical talent while also meaningfully slowing the pace of our overall hiring. In line with this, the volume of requests for our recruiters has gone down. In order to continue our important work to ensure we operate efficiently, we've made the hard decision to reduce the size of our recruiting team," Google spokesperson, Courtenay Mencini, told CRN US in an email.

California-based, Google, has not disclosed the percentage of its recruiting workforce that will be impacted by the layoffs.

The layoffs were first reported by Semafor.

"We unfortunately need to make a significant reduction to the size of the recruiting organisation," Brian Ong, Google's recruiting vice president, told employees in a Wednesday video meeting as reported by CNBC.

"It's not something that was an easy decision to make, and it definitely isn't a conversation any of us wanted to have again this year," Ong added.

"Given the base of hiring that we've received the next several quarters, it's the right thing to do overall."

Workers who were impacted by the layoffs began receiving notice on Wednesday, according to a number of posts on LinkedIn.

"Through all of the layoffs at Google and elsewhere, I had hoped that I would somehow, for some reason remain safe. Sadly, that did not happen today," one employee, who works as a staffing lead, wrote.

A recruiter at Google Cloud also said that she was laid off on 13 September.

Another employee who works in talent acquisition for Google Public Sector said that he had been hit with a layoff.

"I've loved every moment at Google, and I've been surrounded by some of the brightest, most creative minds that the world has," he wrote.

"While I'm saddened that this may come to an end, I look optimistically to what the future may hold."

Spokesperson Mencini added that the company is "supporting those impacted with a transition period, outplacement services, and severance as they look for new opportunities here at Google and beyond."

Alphabet-owned Google has been dialling back hiring since the start of 2023.

The company kicked off the year in January by revealing that it was cutting 12,000 jobs, which affected about 6 per cent of the full-time workforce.

The job cuts at the time included Google's recruiting organisation, as well as software engineers and user experience (UX) professionals.

Alphabet in its most recent fiscal quarter generated a total of $74.6bn, representing an increase of 7 per cent year-over-year.

Google Cloud, for its part, generating over $8bn in revenue, up 28 per cent year-over-year, marking the first time ever as the cloud company made a profit for the second quarter in a row.