Google annouces 2-week hiring freeze. It's to review headcount needs

Google has become the latest tech company to have staffing issues. In an internally shared memo, CEO Sundar Pichai has announced that the company will be “slowing the pace of hiring for the rest of the year”.

Google’s senior Vice-President Prabhakar Raghavan sent out another internal email saying that a hiring freeze for 2 weeks has been put in place. Raghavan wrote, "We’ll use this time to review our headcount needs and align on a new set of prioritised Staffing Requests for the next three months."

Not an overall freeze: As per Pichai’s memo, the search engine giant isn’t completely pausing all staff hiring. Google will continue to hire for jobs related to engineering, technical and other critical roles.

As for the 2 week hiring freeze, Raghavan clarified in his email that job offers that have already been extended to applicants will remain valid but no new offers will be made during the freeze.

Google spokesperson Chris Pappas furthered confirmed the news to The Verge saying, “As Sundar announced, we are slowing hiring for the rest of the year. In line with that, we’re pausing most new offers for two weeks to enable teams to prioritise their roles and hiring plans for the rest of the year.”

Why: Pichai said that the reason why Google was going to take a pause is, “Like all companies, we’re (Google) not immune to economic headwinds.”

In Q2 of 2022, Google has hired 10,000 new employees and has “a strong number of commitments for Q3” due to college hiring season. Pichai's memo said the progress in Google's hiring seen this year is also one of the reasons why the company will slowly bring new people in.

Following the trend:  Google isn’t the only company to announce a slowdown in hiring this year.

In May, Microsoft told its employees that the company is going to slow down hiring in the Windows, Office and Teams groups and has been eliminating multiple job openings due to economic volatility. In July, Microsoft laid off 1,800 employees from its workforce.

To cope with a potential economic slump, in July, Apple announced that it will be decreasing hiring and its spending in 2023 in some divisions.

Also in July, Twitter laid off 30% (100 employees) of its talent acquisition team after a company-wide hiring freeze.

Due to subscription issues and falling revenue, in June, Netflix announced that the streaming giant is laying off 300 people from its workforce, primarily in the US. In May, the streaming giant had already laid off about 150 people from its US workforce.