Not even your favorite big tech companies are immune to economic woes
The current economic landscape globally is painting a grim scenario. As fears of a global recession mount, companies and regular folks are bracing themselves for disaster. And those fears have even reached multi-billion dollar, big tech companies, who are already making moves to cut down unnecessary spending and keep business flowing. Among those is also Google. The approach the company is taking, for now at least, is to address one of the main sources for added expenses — hiring.
As stated in an internal memo to employees shared by Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, the company will be slowing down hiring for the rest of the year (surfaced by The Verge). This is in line with a report from Insider saying that Google will pull back hiring as a response to the current uncertain economic circumstances. According to the memo itself, Google won’t do a complete hiring freeze, as the company will still hire and look to fill important roles — namely, “engineering, technical and other critical roles” that are “aligned with our long-term priorities.”
When asked for comment, Google confirmed to us the authenticity of the memo, but refused to provide further comment.
This joins similar measures taken by companies like Meta, Snap, and Spotify, while others like Twitter and Netflix are even resorting to laying off employees.
Google hired approximately 10,000 people in Q2 2022 alone, but instead of expanding those hiring efforts from now onwards, they’ll get pulled back, at least for the moment. Instead, Google will re-deploy resources towards higher-priority areas, with Mr. Pichai also mentioning that the company will need to be “more entrepreneurial” and work with “greater urgency, sharper focus, and more hunger than we’ve shown on sunnier days.”
Given it’s not a complete hiring freeze, the scale at which Google is reducing its human resources spending is not immediately clear. It’s also not certain if Google will take additional action to keep its expenses in check if the global economy keeps worsening.
