Google chief Sundar Pichai has reportedly told employees that the company will be “slowing down the pace of hiring for the rest of the year” amid an “uncertain global economic outlook”.
While the company is not freezing hiring completely and will focus on hiring for “critical roles”, Mr Pichai said Google will be “pausing development” in some cases and “re-deploying resources to higher priority areas,” according to an internal memo, first reported by Insider.
“The uncertain global economic outlook has been top of mind. Like all companies, we’re not immune to economic headwinds,” the Google chief said in the memo.
The company’s growth in the first quarter slowed to 23 per cent, down from a 34 per cent growth in the same period last year, as the global economy starts to gradually reopen from Covid pandemic-induced lockdowns.
While Google is hiring about 10,000 new employees in the second quarter, according to the memo, Mr Pichai said the tech giant will be “slowing the pace of hiring for the rest of the year, while still supporting our most important opportunities”.
“For the balance of 2022 and 2023, we’ll focus our hiring on engineering, technical and other critical roles, and make sure the great talent we do hire is aligned with our long-term priorities,” he noted.
Google has not immediately responded to The Independent’s request for comment.
Mr Pichai has also urged employees to be “more entrepreneurial” and work with “greater urgency, sharper focus, and more hunger” than they have on “sunnier days”.
“Scarcity breeds clarity — this is something we have been saying since the earliest days of Google. It’s what drives focus and creativity that ultimately leads to better products that help people all over the world,” he said.
Google is not the only tech giant scaling down the strength of its employees.
Microsoft is cutting down a number of positions, affecting lesser than 1 per cent of its total workforce, The Washington Post reported on Tuesday.
Last month, electric car manufacturer Tesla also laid off about 200 workers in its autopilot division, days after company chief Elon Musk said he had a “super bad feeling” about the economy in a message to executives titled “pause all hiring worldwide”.
Facebook’s parent company Meta is also reportedly attempting to identify and push out low-performing employees.
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