Google cuts down on staff and operations

The current economic slowdown is hurting even behemoths like Google, which have experienced a meteoric rise in their fortunes over the last decade. The Mountain View-based search engine leader, often cited in employee surveys as the most desirable place to work, has decided to cut 100 full-time recruiter jobs.

Laszlo Bock, vice president of people operations, said the company "is still hiring but at a reduced rate. Given the state of the economy, we recognised that we needed fewer people 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. However, after much consideration, we have with great regret decided that we need to go further," Bock wrote. ''"We know this 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.''

Google spokesman Matt Furman said the 100 employees laid off represent "less than 25 per cent of the total recruiter workforce." In October, Google reported having 20,123 employees as of 30 September. As recently as October, when Google last posted quarterly financial results, the company reported that it had been hiring despite the 'down economy', albeit at a slower pace.

Alan Eustace, the company's senior vice president of engineering and research, said offices would also be closed in Austin, Texas, Trondheim, Norway, and Lulea, Sweden. This is in addition to the closure in Phoenix, Arizona, earlier in September 2008.

Eustace said that Google had been hiring "outstanding engineers in a wide mix of countries. Having offices distributed around the globe is critical to Google's long-term success, and today we have thousands of engineers working in 40 offices in more than 20 countries."

"It has enabled us to make significant improvements in our products and attract more users globally. It has also presented unique challenges. The most difficult of these being to coordinate our efforts across all geographies, and provide engineers with significant, meaningful projects that make a real difference to people's lives."

"Our long-term goal is not to trim the number of people we have working on engineering projects or reduce our global presence, but create a smaller number of more effective engineering sites, which will ensure that innovation and speed remain at our core," he added.