Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google, acknowledged that the search engine provider is “not immune” to economic setbacks when he told staff on Tuesday that Alphabet, the parent company of the tech giant, will reduce hiring through 2023.
The company missed analyst expectations for the first quarter of the year, which led to the internal announcement.
Pichai stated in the memo to the staff that “we’re not immune to economic headwinds, like all companies.” He stated in the memo that “we will be slowing the pace of hiring for the rest of the year, while still supporting our most important opportunities” due to the hiring progress made so far this year.
According to Pichai, Google is aiming to be “more entrepreneurial working with greater urgency, sharper focus, and more hunger than we’ve shown on sunnier days.” He acknowledged that “the uncertain global economic outlook has been top-of-mind.”
The Google CEO added that the company will give priority to hiring individuals for “on engineering, technical and other critical roles” during the 2022–2023 hiring period.
In addition, Pichai stated that Google will halt the development of some processes in other areas and redeploy its resources to “higher priority areas.”
The plan to simplify investment procedures is not clear as to which specific investments will be impacted.
The announcement followed Alphabet, the parent company of Google, reporting weaker Q1 2022 earnings and revenue. Analysts had anticipated $68.11 billion in revenue; however, Alphabet only reported $68.01 billion.
YouTube advertising, in particular, missed analyst expectations as it racked up only $6.9 billion as opposed to the expected $7.51 billion.
Not all major tech companies have announced slower hiring drives this year, including Google. The CEO of Facebook Meta, Mark Zuckerberg, informed staff members earlier this month that the company will hire fewer engineers in 2022—by at least 30%.
At that time, Zuckerberg also gave his staff a heads-up to prepare for a downturn in the economy.
According to Catherine Hill, a spokesperson for Twitter, who spoke to CNN Business in May, the social media platform will stop hiring for the majority of positions that are “business critical.”
The tech giant Apple reportedly slowed hiring for Genius technical-support positions in some retail stores, according to a Bloomberg report from the end of April.
People with knowledge of the situation told the outlet that some employees think the decision was made to cut costs.
