Mountain View, California — Even Google feels the depression. Google Inc. said on its corporate blog that will lay off 100 full-time recruiters and is shutting down some engineering offices, in what might be seen as the latest sign as the recession has not spared one of the technology industry’s most flexible companies.
The layoffs, made public Wednesday in a company blog post, is a very unusual step for Google, which said in October that it is still hiring but at a reduced pace. The company has also recently slashed a significant number of temporary workers in areas ranging from public relations to engineering.
This in fact is not the first layoff, earlier the company had shed off some people after its DoubleClick acquisition last March, but those were people not originally hired by Google.
As Google has clearly mentioned that it is reducing hiring, it does make sense that it would not need as many recruiters. Google connected the reductions affecting company recruiters to the recession.
“Witnessing the poor state of the economy, we recognized that we needed fewer people to focus on hiring,” said Laszlo Bock, Google’s vice president of people operations, in the blog posting.
“Our first step to address this was to wind down almost all our contracts with external contractors and vendors providing recruiting services for Google. However, after much consideration, we have with great regret decided that we need to go further and reduce the overall size of our recruiting organization by approximately 100 positions,” he wrote.
“The head count is very few, but what concerns me is that this is the first example of laying off full-time employees in Google’s history,” said Collins Stewart analyst Sandeep Aggrawal.
“You hire people in anticipation of growth… But now, like anyone else, the growth outlook has definitely come down for Google,” Aggrawal said, adding that he expects the Internet giant to grow at 20 percent this year, compared to a 60 percent growth rate in 2007.
Google spokesman Matthew Furman said the closing of engineering offices in Texas, Norway and Sweden was not motivated by cost cutting and that Google will offer jobs to the 70 employees affected by the changes.
In a separate post, Alan Eustace, the company’s senior vice president of engineering and research, said the moves would help Google better coordinate its efforts across different geographic areas.
In September the company closed its office in Phoenix, Ariz.
Google has tightened up its belt in several other areas as well, shutting down various projects such as Lively and bringing ads to properties such as Google Finance and Maps that previously lacked them.
During Google’s third-quarter earnings call in October, Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt said that the company would continue to keep a close eye on costs.
Some perks are under pressure, too, with some curtailed cafeteria operations. And Toby Daniels, vice president of business development at Mint Digital, had this to tweet on Tuesday: “Just left a meeting with senior exec at Google/Youtube. The credit crunch has hit these guys pretty hard. No more bottled water in office!”
So far, Google’s search-advertising business has held up well, in part because its advertising is more cost-effective than other forms of online ads.
Nevertheless, all these acts show a sign that in this deep recession, even one of the world’s most successful companies is mortal. It seems likely that even if Google fares better than most, as appears likely, it would not be completely spared from the worst economic troubles in many years.