Google to slow hiring for rest of year over recession fears, Alphabet CEO tells staff

Alphabet’s Google plans to slow hiring for the remainder of the year in the face of a potential economic recession, Chief Executive Officer Sundar Pichai said Tuesday in an email to staff.

Pichai said the company will focus on hiring “engineering, technical and other critical roles,” in 2022 and 2023, according to a copy of the email viewed by Bloomberg News.

“Moving forward, we need to be more entrepreneurial, working with greater urgency, sharper focus, and more hunger than we’ve shown on sunnier days,” Pichai wrote. “In some cases, that means consolidating where investments overlap and streamlining processes.”

Historically, Google has remained relatively immune to the economic dips of the technology sector. The internet giant paused hiring after the financial crisis more than a decade ago, but has since regularly added waves of new employees for its main advertising business as well as areas such as smartphones, self-driving cars and wearable devices that aren’t yet profitable.

Google parent Alphabet, which employed almost 164,000 people as of March 31, has hired primarily in recent years for Google’s cloud division and new fields like hardware.

Google’s move mirrors that of other tech companies. In May, Snap and Lyft said they would slow hiring. Several weeks later, Instacart said it would dial back job growth and Tesla followed with an announcement of a 10 per cent reduction for its salaried workforce.

Earlier this week, Google rival Microsoft announced it was cutting a small number of jobs. Meta Platforms also reduced its hiring plans because of concerns over economic conditions.