Part of the announcement that Nokia has switched its primary smartphone platform to Windows Phone is that the Symbian mobile operating system is being slowly phased out. As a result, Nokia CEO Stephen Elop confirmed the company will be cutting jobs. In Finland, the numbers may be quite significant.

"You're talking about 20,000 people, it's a big number," Mauri Pekkarinen, Minister for Economic Affairs, said in a statement. "We're talking about far and away the biggest process of structural change that Finland has ever seen in the new technology sector." The Finnish government said it will help people find new jobs. Nokia and Nokia Siemens Networks employed some 132,000 people at the end of 2010. 19,800 of those reside in Finland, and more than 6,000 people work for Nokia's research and development in four Finnish cities.

Soon after it became clear that many Nokia employees would be losing their jobs, Google took the opportunity to step in. Google EMEA recruiter Aidan Biggins used Twitter to remind Nokia software engineers that the search giant has job openings: "Any Nokia software engineers need a job? We're hiring: www.google.com/jobs."

Google hasn't exactly had words of support for the Nokia and Microsoft partnership; for example, the company attacked the two with a clever bird analogy just yesterday. More importantly, we don't think Nokia employees will get any sort of special treatment during Google recruitment. The company is already seeing a record number of job applications and it has to be extremely picky as it is.