Google Will Slow Down Hiring Through 2023 After Alphabet Misses Q1 Analyst Estimates

Google CEO Sundar Pichai told employees Tuesday that the tech giant’s parent company, Alphabet, will slow down hiring through 2023, admitting that the search engine provider is “not immune” to economic setbacks.

The internal announcement came after the company missed analyst estimates for the first quarter of the year.

“Like all companies, we’re not immune to economic headwinds,” Pichai said in the memo to employees. “Because of the hiring progress achieved so far this year, we’ll be slowing the pace of hiring for the rest of the year, while still supporting our most important opportunities,” he wrote in the memo.

Pichai acknowledged “the uncertain global economic outlook has been top of mind,” thus Google is looking “to be more entrepreneurial working with greater urgency, sharper focus, and more hunger than we’ve shown on sunnier days.”

The Google CEO further noted that for the 2022 through 2023 hiring period, the company will prioritize hiring people “on engineering, technical and other critical roles.”

Finally, Pichai said Google will re-deploy its resources to “higher priority areas” and pause development of some processes in other areas.

It is unclear which particular investments will be affected by the plan to streamline investment processes.

The news came after Google parent company Alphabet reported weaker earnings and revenue during Q1 2022. Analysts were expecting $68.11 billion in revenue, but Alphabet reported a smaller $68.01 billion.

YouTube advertising, in particular, missed analyst expectations as it racked up only $6.9 billion as opposed to the expected $7.51 billion.

Google isn’t the only big tech company that announced a slower hiring drive this year. Earlier this month, Facebook Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg told employees that plans to hire engineers in 2022 will be reduced by at least 30%.

At that time, Zuckerberg also warned employees to brace themselves for an economic slump.

In May, Twitter spokesperson Catherine Hill told CNN Business that the social media platform will pause most of its hiring processes to save “business critical” positions.

Late in April, Bloomberg reported that tech giant Apple slowed hiring for Genius technical-support positions in some retail stores.

People familiar with the situation told the outlet that some employees believe the move was for cost-cutting purposes.