This is pushing companies, including tech giants, to implement hiring freezes and layoffs.
Find out what Google and Apple are up to.
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Just one month ago, tech giant Apple announced it was slowing down its hiring amid a looming recession.
Bloomberg reported that Apple CEO Tim Cook told analysts: “We believe in investing through the downturn. And so we’ll continue to hire people and invest in areas, but we are being more deliberate in doing so in recognition of the realities of the environment.”
While Apple was clear that this hiring deceleration wouldn’t impact all departments, one of the teams that is going to be affected is HR.
The tech giant has gone one step further and laid off 100 contract recruiters. The layoffs affected all regions, but didn’t involve the entire contract hiring team or any employed recruiters.
The decision to layoff the workers responsible for bringing in new employees shows how serious Apple is getting about decelerating its hiring.
Bloomberg reported that the contract recruiters would receive pay and medical benefits for two weeks.
Is Google planning a layoff?
Apple’s hiring freeze and layoffs come at a time when the wider tech sector is struggling financially.
Like Apple, Google announced a hiring freeze in July to “review…headcount needs” – while Google’s hiring pause was originally only planned for two weeks, it has now been extended by leadership.
According to Business Insider, the tech giant is not be filling roles when people leave, and is slowing down hiring beyond critical roles.
As a result, Google employees are expressing concerns that layoffs are on the horizon.
These fears have been stoked by leadership teams calling for more productive teams, and for performance to be tracked.
On a recent earnings call, CEO Sundar Pichai shared that he had “real concerns that our productivity as a whole is not where it needs to be for the headcount we have.”
Pichai called on employees to help “create a culture that is more mission-focused, more focused on our products, more customer focused. We should think about how we can minimize distractions and really raise the bar on both product excellence and productivity.”
According to Insider, sales executives in Google’s cloud branch told employees that they are planning an “overall examination of sales productivity and productivity in general”. They added that if financial results don’t improve next quarter, “don’t look up, there will be blood on the streets”.
The second quarterly earnings for Google’s parent company Alphabet were below analysts’ expectations. Although revenue for the quarter was up 13% from the previous year, revenue was $69.7 billion, below analyst estimates of $69.9 billion. Profits were also flat year on year, and Alphabet added 144,000 workers in the past year (a 21% jump).
While Google’s CPO Fiona Cicconi said that there a no immediate plans for layoffs right now, she didn’t rule it out for the future.
She said: “We’re asking teams to be more focused and efficient and we’re working out what that means as a company as well.
“Even though we can’t be sure of the economy in the future, we’re not currently looking to reduce Google’s overall workforce.”
UNLEASH has reached out to Google and Apple, but is yet to receive a response.
