Google Lays Off 100 Recruiters, Slows Down on Hiring

Two months after reports surfaced that the Internet ad and search leader would reduce the number of contract workers it used, Google Inc. announced this week that it’s laying off about 100 recruiters and slowed its pace on hiring new employees.

 

In a blog post titled “Changes to recruiting,” Laszlo Bock, Google’s (News - Alert) vice president of “people operations,” said that the slower economy forced the Mountain View, California-based company to cut down on the number of people it had focused on hiring.

 

“Our first step to address this was to wind down almost all our contracts with external contractors and vendors providing recruiting services for Google,” Bock said. “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.”

 

The news doesn’t come as a total surprise.

 

Yet TMCnet reported, the layoffs come hard upon an announcement just two months ago that Google had no plans to let its full-time people go. The decision regarding the contract workers was said by some to show Google’s vulnerability during a global economic slowdown.

 

The reports of Google’s cutting back on contracts also come after the company announced that it’s pulling out of virtual world business.

 

Despite predictions that 33 million users will register for virtual worlds by 2013, drawing a wide variety of providers and companies to the relatively new technology, officials at Google say their virtual reality service, called “Lively,” will be shut down at the end of this year.

 

“It has been a tough decision, but we want to ensure that we prioritize our resources and focus more on our core search, ads and apps business,” the so-called “Lively Team” said on the company’s blog. “Lively.com will be discontinued at the end of December, and everyone who has worked on the project will then move on to other teams.”

 

According to The Associated Press, Google’s decision to kill Lively reflects the service’s inability to stand out in a virtual reality market dominated by Second Life.

 

For Blakely, Google also may be looking to cut its contract staff now because the financial crisis is starting to take its toll on online advertising.

 

“Silicon Valley has already suffered a slew of job cuts,” Blakely said. “More than 140,000 jobs have been lost there in the past few months, according to Challenger, Gray and Christmas, the consultants, as the axe has fallen at tech industry stalwarts including Hewlett Packard, Sun Microsystems (News - Alert) and Yahoo.”

 

Bock said in his blog post that the company knew the change will be very difficult for the people concerned, “and we hope that many of them will be able to find new roles at Google.”

 

“They helped build this company, new hire by new hire, and we are enormously grateful for everything they have done,” Bock said.