The CEO of Google parent company Alphabet, Sundar Pichai, told staff about the decision in an email while mentioning other areas of cost-cutting the company is undertaking.
He added that the decision to slow down the pace of hiring is to ensure Google “emerges from this year at a more appropriate size and scale that it would otherwise”.
“We need to carefully prioritise hiring employees who will address our greatest user and business needs,” added Pichai in the email.
“Beyond hiring, we continue to invest, but will be recalibrating the focus and pace of our investments in areas like data centres and machines, and non-business essential marketing and travel.”
In 2018, Alphabet had employed 103,549 people, which grew to 118,899 people full-time at the end of 2019.
“We’ve continued to show up for people in moments big and small, whether it’s providing accurate and authoritative information to keep families safe; supporting products and infrastructure to keep our and others’ services running; and delivering great content to keep people’s spirits up in tough moments,” added Pichai.
The company committed more than $800 million in grants, loans and ad credits to help small businesses and others affected by COVID-19, and Google.org has committed $50 million (plus an additional $2,500 in gift-matching per Googler) to help communities globally.
Elsewhere, Google’s cloud subsidiary reported a surge in the use of its video conference product Google Meet, as the COVID-19 pandemic causes a large population of the world to work from home.
The cloud giant’s CEO Thomas Kurian revealed that the company made the advance features in Google Meet free to all its G Suite and G Suite for Education customers worldwide.
