Having slammed brakes on hiring, Google says it no longer needs quite so many recruiters

Google has confirmed it is this week laying off a few hundred staff from its global recruitment team.

With the internet giant hitting the brakes on hiring generally, its bosses have now decided they don't need quite as many recruiters as they currently have on the books, and thus it's time to let go a portion of them. We understand that a large majority of the team will remain employed.

Those leaving the corporation, however, will begin receiving the bad news from today.

“As we’ve said, we continue to invest in top engineering and technical talent while also meaningfully slowing the pace of our overall hiring," Google spokesperson Courtenay Mencini told us in a statement on Wednesday.

"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.

"We’re supporting everyone impacted with a transition period, outplacement services, and severance as they look for new opportunities here at Google and beyond.”

Google has previously repeatedly said it will be slowing down its spending and hiring having gone on a bumper recruitment spree during the pandemic, resulting in its ranks swelling well beyond what it is now comfortable with. In January, it axed 12,000 people, or about six percent of its full-time workforce, having ballooned from a headcount of 120,000 in early 2020 to about 190,000 by this time last year – a rate of nearly 6,000 additional hires a month.

That's not to say all hiring has stopped: Google continues posting job ads for roles. It's just not vacuuming up folks and turning them into Nooglers as fast and as hard as it was during the pandemic cloud boom, and thus is draining its recruiter pool.

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Semafor first reported the recruiter cuts. CNBC meanwhile chipped in that laid-off workers won't be immediately cut off from their work systems and offices.

That's significant because, as El Reg has heard and as reported elsewhere, Google management came under fire at the start of the year for its handling of that aforementioned large layoff, in which some workers only realized they had been cut when their access badges just stopped working one morning, and others questioned the process by which people, even those who were just promoted, were selected for termination. ®