Alphabet lays off hundreds from global recruitment team

Google parent Alphabet is laying off employees from its global recruiting team as the tech giant continues to slow hiring, it said on Wednesday (Sep 13).

“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 said in response to queries from CNA.

The company’s decision to let go of a few hundred employees is not part of a wide-scale layoff and will retain a significant majority of the team for hiring critical roles. It will also help the workers search for roles within the company and elsewhere.

Google also told CNA that it is supporting everyone impacted with a “transition period, outplacement services, and severance as they look for new opportunities” at the company and beyond.

It added that the company continues 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.”

Alphabet is the first “Big Tech” company to lay off employees this quarter after peers like Meta, Microsoft and Amazon downsized aggressively earlier in 2023 as a weak economy put an end to their pandemic-led hiring sprees.

California-based Alphabet cut about 12,000 jobs in January, reducing its workforce by 6 per cent.

Layoffs in the US rose more than threefold in August from July and nearly fourfold compared with a year ago, according to a report by employment firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

Economists polled by Reuters had forecast that new claims for state unemployment benefits would rise by about 8 per cent in the week ended Sep 9, after having fallen 13,000 to 216,000 in the prior seven-day period.