On Wednesday, July 20, Google announced that it would be taking a two-week hiring freeze. 

This comes after the search giant announced last week that it will be slowing down its hiring process until the end of 2022 to take a fresh look at the overall hiring process of the company. 

Google Announces Hiring Freeze

According to The Information, the search giant hired 10,000 people in Q2 alone, with full quarter results set to be released on July 26. 

Prabhakar Raghavan, the senior vice president at Google, said in an email that the company would use the two-week hiring freeze to review its headcount needs and align on a new set of prioritized Staffing Requests for the next three months. 

The hiring freeze would not affect offers that are already made but would put a pause on future contract extensions. 

Google's move aligns with last week's internal memo where CEO Sundar Pichai said the search giant is looking to be more entrepreneurial and re-deploy resources in higher-priority areas, according to The Verge. 

Also Read: HTC Is Laying Off 1,500 Employees: Is This The End? 

A Google spokesperson told TechCrunch that the company would slow down hiring for 2022. In line with that, the company will pause new offers for two weeks to enable teams to prioritize their roles and to hire plans until the end of 2022. 

The same measures have already taken place at other tech companies as some have issued hiring freezes and even laid off employees. 

Meta reportedly halted hiring across some of their engineering teams and issued cutbacks across the board at the social media company. 

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told its employees that there would be fewer resources available and employees would have to prepare to do more work. 

Also, Twitter issued a hiring freeze, then laid off 30% of its talent acquisition team two months into said freeze in early July. 

Google Cloud Hiring

In March, Google laid off around 100 cloud workers, and its employees delivered a petition to the company asking to give the laid-off workers more time to find new jobs and alleging that some workers found out they had lost their job from social media and not their bosses. 

The petition claims that engineers, program managers, and other support people in Google Cloud roles were given two months to find new hobs within the company and that the search giant has not provided enough information or opportunities for those workers to do that in the 60-day window successfully. 

Google has continued to maintain that workers are simply being offered a chance to transfer. This ignores the reality that a lot of workers do not qualify for currently available roles and the complexity of the transfer process means that most employees are facing the termination of their livelihood in under two months. 

The petition's authors, who were members of the Alphabet Workers Union, said in a statement.

There are over 1,400 Google workers who have signed the petition for the laid-off workers, according to Protocol. 

The petition asks that the search giant extend the 60-day transfer window to 180 days and that Google create a transparent process around other jobs within the company that works could fill up.

Related Article: TikTok is Currently Undergoing a Global Restructure and Began Laying Off Employees 

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Written by Sophie Webster