Google will lay off 100 recruiters, shift to fewer sites

IDG News Service - Google Inc. plans to lay off 100 recruiters and is closing engineering offices in Texas, Norway and Sweden as it tries to cope with the global economic downturn.

The company is still hiring but at a reduced rate, it said in October during its most recent quarterly earnings call. Given the state of the economy, Google recognized that it needs fewer people to do the hiring, Vice President of People Operations Laszlo Block wrote in a post on the company's official blog on Wednesday.

After winding down contracts with external contractors and vendors that provided recruiting services, Google has decided to reduce the overall size of its internal recruiting organization by about 100 people, Block said. The company hopes that many of those workers will find new roles at Google, he added.

Google is also asking 70 engineering staffers at sites in Austin as well as Trondheim, Norway, and Lulea, Sweden, to move to other locations, reducing the number of sites in which it operates, it said in another blog posting. The company is making this move because it was becoming difficult to coordinate its engineering efforts across locations and to provide engineers with significant, meaningful projects that make a real difference to people's lives, Alan Eustace, senior vice president for engineering and research, wrote on Wednesday.

Google has engineers working in 40 offices in more than 20 countries. In September, the company asked its engineers in Phoenix to move to other offices, and the vast majority have moved, Eustace said. The move enabled Google to build larger and more effective teams, reduce communications overhead, and give engineers increased options for future projects, he added.

The company's long-term goal is not to cut its engineering staff but to create a smaller number of more effective engineering sites, Eustace said.