Google announces layoffs of recruiters
Unclear if latest rounds of cuts impacted Austin
Tech giant Google, which has a significant presence in Austin, is cutting recruiters in its latest layoffs this year.
The New York Times reported Google laid off several hundred employees, which the American-Statesman has also confirmed.
The latest layoffs follow widescale cuts the company made in January when Google slashed 12,000 jobs, or about 6% of its nearly 187,000-person worldwide workforce. At the time, the company announced the cuts in a blog post, and a spokesperson declined to say if Central Texas workers were impacted.
On Thursday, Google spokesperson Courtenay Mencini confirmed to the Statesman that new layoffs affecting recruiters occurred. The company did not comment on if the layoffs hit any Austin-area employees.
“As we’ve said, we continue to invest in top engineering and technical talent while also meaningfully slowing the pace of our overall hiring,” Mencini said. “In line with this, the volume of requests for our recruiters has gone down. In order to continue our important work to ensure we operate efficiently, we’ve made the hard decision to reduce the size of our recruiting team.”
Mencini said the company is supporting affected employees through the transition period with outplacement services and severance.
Google has had a large Austin presence since it first opened an Austin office in 2007 that is considered one of the company’s largest hubs. Google also has had plans to occupy all of a new 35-story tower being built at 601 W. Second St. As of late 2021, the company had at least 1,500 employees in Central Texas with plans to grow. The company did not give an updated Austin headcount after either recent round of layoffs.
In its latest earnings call in July, the company said it is “sharpening its focus” on artificial intelligence, and, as part of this, the company is finding areas to operate more cost efficiently. The company said it was slowing expense growth and its pace of hiring and had reallocated a number of teams to high-priority efforts.
Google’s layoffs are among industry-wide cuts in recent years
Google’s latest layoffs come amid a rocky period for the technology industry as tech giants have laid off thousands of employees in recent years. This has included companies with big Austin-area presences such as Round Rock-based Dell Technologies, Austin-based Indeed, Austinbased Tesla, Meta and Intel.
Dan Ives, an industry analyst with Wedbush Securities, said despite Google’s latest cuts, the industry’s layoffs have mostly slowed down.
“It’s still bumpy for many tech players such as Google, but we believe 95% of the layoffs are now in the
rear-view mirror. Austin has seen an influx of talent around the tech community, and we believe the AI revolution will add jobs in Austin over the coming years including from Google,” Ives said.
It has not been immediately clear how many Austin-area workers have been affected by national rounds of layoffs, because many companies have not shared local layoff numbers.
A federal law known as the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification, or WARN, Act requires employers to notify the local government in the event of a mass layoff or business closure under certain circumstances, but many layoffs don’t meet the criteria for self-reporting under the narrow and complex regulations. This might include Google, which has so far not shown up in any WARN notices for Texas.
Despite the lack of concrete numbers, industry experts have said Central Texas has likely seen impacts from national layoffs in recent years.
In recent months, the latest tech cuts have included Round Rock-based Dell Technologies which cut an unknown number of sales positions last month, tech staffing firm Accenture, which cut several hundred jobs in two rounds of layoffs, and Babylon Health, which shut down its U.S. operations, cutting 94 at its Austin headquarters.