Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
Google has reportedly internally announced a hiring freeze that will remain in place for two weeks. According to a report from The Information, Prabhakar Raghavan, Google’s senior vice president, sent out a company-wide email to inform workers about the decision. This follows Google’s announcement of a hiring slowdown that will last until the end of this year.
“We’ll use this time to review our headcount needs and align on a new set of prioritized Staffing Requests for the next three months,” Raghavan writes. As noted by The Information, Google says that the hiring freeze won’t affect existing job offers, but the company will no longer extend any new ones to applicants.
In his message to employees earlier this month about the slowdown, Google CEO Sundar Pichai stated that the company added 10,000 workers in the second quarter of 2022 alone. At the time, Pichai said Google would focus on hiring employees in engineering, technical, and “other critical roles,” but now that hiring has been paused completely.
“Google is reading the room and following the trend of other Big Tech players slowing hiring into 2023 given the macro storm clouds,” Wedbush analyst Dan Ives said in a statement to The Verge. “Google is seeing a slowdown in digital ad spend and we view this as a prudent move.”
As Ives notes, Google joins a number of other large tech companies that have either paused or halted hiring. In May, Meta announced a hiring freeze for employees in specific teams, including those who work on shopping features and Messenger Kids. Twitter and Spotify have also cut down on hiring, with Apple planning a slowdown in 2023. Other companies, including Substack, Tesla, and Netflix, have had layoffs amidst an economic downturn.