Google to give staff 10% raise and $1,000 holiday bonus

Everyone knows Google is a great place to work, but lately the company has been losing employees to smaller companies that are growing faster, such as Facebook (roughly 1 in 10 Facebook employees are ex-Googlers). The search giant has been known to give huge bonuses and incentives as part of its counteroffers to keep certain employees from leaving, but now it looks like the company is thinking bigger than that. CEO Eric Schmidt has decided to reward all Google employees with a company-wide raise, according to The Wall Street Journal.

The salary increase for all 23,000 Google employees will take effect on January 1, 2011. It will be a minimum of 10 percent, meaning some employees will see even bigger raises. There's also a $1,000 holiday bonus coming at the end of this year, and Google plans to pay the taxes on it, in order to allow employees to keep everything. It's estimated that all these extra expenses will cost the company some $1 billion.

Google is clearly going the extra mile to keep its employees as part of the company, and happy about it. Furthermore, the move suggests that the company's financial performance continues to be very strong. "While we don't typically comment on internal matters, we do believe that competitive compensation plans are important to the future of the company," a Google spokesperson said in a statement. Google CEO Eric Schmidt disclosed the raise in an e-mail to employees: "We want to make sure that you feel rewarded for your hard work," he wrote. "We want to continue to attract the best people to Google."