Google Layoffs Hit Hundreds On Recruiting Team As Company ‘Meaningfully’ Slows Hiring

For the second time this year, the tech giant is cutting jobs within its recruiting organization, according to reports confirmed by Google to CRN.

Tech giant Google is reportedly cutting hundreds of jobs within its recruiting organization 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 in an email.

Mountain View, Calif.-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.

[Related: Google Parent Alphabet Layoffs Hit Cloud, Partnerships, UX, Engineers, Recruiters]

“We unfortunately need to make a significant reduction to the size of the recruiting organization,” 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 said. “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,” write one employee, who works as staffing lead. Another employee, a recruiter at Google Cloud, said that she was laid off today.

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 dialing 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 percent of the full-time workforce. The job cuts at the time included Google’s recruiting organization, as well as software engineers and user experience (UX) professionals.

Alphabet in its most recent fiscal quarter generated a total of $74.6 billion, representing an increase of 7 percent year over year. Google Cloud, for its part, generating over $8 billion in revenue, up 28 percent year over year, marking the first time ever as the cloud company made a profit for the second quarter in a row.