According to reports, Google CEO Sundar Pichai informed staff that due to a “uncertain global economic outlook,” the company will “slow down the pace of hiring for the rest of the year.”
According to an internal memo first obtained by Insider, Mr. Pichai said Google will be “pausing development” in some cases and “re-deploying resources to higher priority areas” even though the company isn’t completely freezing hiring and will focus on filling “critical roles.”
“The hazy future of the world economy has been on everyone’s mind. We’re not immune to economic challenges, like all businesses, the Google CEO wrote in the memo.
As the world economy slowly emerges from lockdowns brought on by the Covid pandemic, the company’s growth in the first quarter slowed to 23% from a 34% growth in the same period last year.
According to the memo, Google will be adding 10,000 new employees in the second quarter, but Mr. Pichai stated that the tech giant will “slow the hiring pace for the rest of the year, while still supporting our most important opportunities.”
In the remaining months of 2022 and 2023, he said, “We’ll concentrate our hiring efforts on engineering, technical, and other critical roles, and make sure the great talent we do hire is aligned with our long-term priorities.”
Google did not respond right away when The Independent asked for comment.
Additionally, Mr. Pichai urged staff members to work with “greater urgency, sharper focus, and more hunger” than they did on “sunnier days.”
“We have been saying since the beginning of Google that scarcity breeds clarity. It’s what fuels concentration and creativity, which ultimately results in better products that benefit people everywhere, he said.
Google is not the only tech behemoth to reduce the number of employees on staff.
A number of Microsoft jobs are being eliminated, accounting for less than 1% of the company’s overall workforce, The Washington Post reported on Tuesday.
Tesla, a manufacturer of electric vehicles, also terminated about 200 employees in its autopilot division last month, days after Elon Musk, the company’s CEO, expressed his “super bad feeling” about the economy in a message to executives with the subject line “pause all hiring worldwide.”
According to reports, Meta, the parent company of Facebook, is also attempting to identify and terminate underperforming workers.
