Google Reviews ‘Headcount Needs’ With Hiring Pause: Report

‘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,’ a top Google executive said in an email.

Sundar Pichai

Google will reportedly pause hiring for two weeks after the tech giant recently said it was slowing the pace of adding to its payroll for the rest of the year into 2023.

The Mountain View, Calif.-based company, which reports its second quarter 2022 financial results next Tuesday, July 26, will evaluate hiring needs over this time, according to The Information.

Prabhakar Raghavan, a senior vice president at Google, said in an email to employees that the company’s decision would not affect job offers that had already been extended to applicants, but no new offers would be made to job applicants until the pause was complete, The Information reported.

[RELATED STORY: WHY GOOGLE IS ‘SLOWING THE PACE OF HIRING’: CEO SUNDAR PICHAI]

“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 said in the email.

CRN has reached out to Google for comment.

Alphabet had 163,906 employees as of the end of this past March, an increase of more than 23,000 from the same time the year before, according to a regulatory filing.

Last week, Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google parent Alphabet, said the firm will slow down the pace for the remainder of the year and into 2023.

“Because of the hiring progress achieved so far this year, we’ll be slowing the pace of hiring for the rest of the year, while still supporting our most important opportunities,” said Pichai in a letter to Google employees seen by CRN.

“For the balance of 2022 and 2023, we’ll focus our hiring on engineering, technical and other critical roles, and make sure the great talent we do hire is aligned with our long-term priorities,” Pichai said.

Other tech companies have revealed hiring changes and even layoffs over the summer, including at hot cybersecurity startups Lacework, OneTrust and Cybereason. Tech stalwart Microsoft said it laid off a “small number of employees” earlier this month due to a “strategic alignment,” but that the tech giant still plans to “grow headcount in the year ahead.”