Breaks pile up.
Google will pause hiring for two weeks, The Information reported on Wednesday, citing a leaked email from top executive Prabhakar Raghavan.
“We will take this time to review our counting needs and align ourselves with a new set of priority staff requests over the next three months,” he wrote in the note.
Raghavan also said the company would not recover the offers that are already in play, but would not make new ones for two weeks, the media added.
Last week, Google’s CEO warned employees he would slow hiring for the rest of the year and encouraged staff to be more “entrepreneurial”.
The technology industry had a profitable pandemic (Alphabet, Google’s parent company, hired 23,000 people from March 2021 to March 2022). But things have gotten worse lately, with Google and other social and tech networking companies pausing or slowing down hiring.
On Tuesday, Wired reported that TikTok planned to rework operations and likely lay off people, the same day Bloomberg reported on Apple’s plans to slow hiring and spending in selected areas of the company. Twitter has also announced a hiring freeze.
The National Bureau of Economic Research, a private nonprofit organization, is the official arbiter of when the United States is in recession, and economists in the monthly Bloomberg survey increased the likelihood of it coming, according to CNBC. This comes after last week’s news that inflation has not slowed.
“Google is reading the room and following the trend of other Big Tech players slowing down hiring until 2023 due to storm macro-clouds,” technology analyst Daniel Ives of Wedbush Securities said in a text message.
“We see this as a prudent move,” he added. The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment.