Tech giant Google has laid off hundreds of employees, in a second round of job cuts this year, amid continued job cuts in Silicon Valley. The Alphabet-owned company has confirmed the layoffs of hundreds of staff members in the recruiting division, the media has reported. To recall, earlier in January, the Google parent eliminated 12,000 jobs or about 6 per cent of its workforce across the firm. The employees laid off in January including those from the recruitment and engineering divisions.
During the company's earnings call in July, company CEO Sundar Pichai had said the tech giant was continuing to slow its "expense growth and pace of hiring".
"We continue to invest in top engineering and technical talent while also meaningfully slowing the pace of our overall hiring," a Google spokesperson Courtenay Mencini was quoted as saying by CBS News, adding that the workload for recruiters has declined as hiring slows.
"To ensure we operate efficiently, we've made the hard decision to reduce the size of our recruiting team," the spokesperson added.
According to a report by employment firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas job cuts in the US rose more than threefold in August as compared to July and nearly fourfold compared with a year ago period, said a report by news agency Reuters.
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To recall, Madhav Chinnappa, Google’s Director of News Ecosystem Development was sacked by the tech giant in July.
Chinnappa said that he was being let go amid layoffs at Google, after a stint of almost 13 years. Chinnappa had taken to LinkedIn to announce that he was laid off. But, he added that he is in the “privileged position of being able to have some time to figure out his next move". The Indian-origin senior executive added that he is on a "gardening leave" at the moment.
Layoffs across tech and IT majors have been taking place across tech giants Twitter, Facebook parent Meta, and Google, among others. Facebook parent Meta is said to have laid off almost 21,000 workers since November last year and has spent a significant amount of money on that.
According to a report by SF Gate, Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp-parent Meta mentioned some of the costs of its “restructuring” this year in this week's quarterly earnings report.