Why it matters: Like many other Big Tech companies these days, Google is making significant cuts to its employmee numbers. The latest batch of layoffs within the company concerns recruiters, who aren't that useful anymore now that the pace of overall hiring has slowed down.
Google has confirmed that it is firing "hundreds" of employees across its global recruiting team, even though the company will seemingly retain a significant majority of the team. The mass layoffs experienced by tech companies in the past few months (and years) are an ongoing affair, while the market is still adapting to the post-pandemic world.
Google spokesperson Courtenay Mencini said that the company continues to invest in "top engineering and technical talent," while the overall hiring pace has been "meaningfully" slowed down. Therefore, the volume of requests going to recruiters has gone down. Google needs to operate "efficiently" to stay afloat, so it made the "hard decision" to let hundreds of said recruiters go.
Earlier this year, Google cut 12,000 jobs (or 6% of its overall workforce) worldwide. The company had 120,000 employees in 2020, while two years later those numbers had ballooned to 190,000. In the past, Google was accused of immediately cutting off access to fired employees. Now, Mountain View is assuring its former employees that things will be managed in a different way.
Google is no Twitter/X, a company that has become known for firing thousands of people without providing the promised severance after termination – and getting sued for it. Mencini confirmed that they will be supporting people impacted by the new round of mass layoffs, providing a transition period, outplacement services, and severance while they look for new job opportunities – in Google or elsewhere.
According to what Google's recruiting vice president Brian Ong said to employees during a video meeting, the company needed to make "a significant reduction" to the size of its recruiting force. Given the expected hiring trends for the next several quarters, Ong said a mass layoff among recruiters is 'the right thing to do overall."
Fired recruiters have already started to receive termination emails this Wednesday, Ong confirmed. Former employees will retain access to offices for a week, while online systems won't abruptly cut them off for an even longer period of time.