Alphabet, Google’s parent company lays off hundreds of employees

The tech giant Google’s parent company Alphabet will be laying off hundreds of employees from its global recruiting team.

As per the media reports, the layoff continues amid slow hiring. Moreover, the company is actively assisting affected employees in their search for alternative roles, both within Alphabet and in other organizations.

Alphabet is the first “Big Tech” company to lay off employees this quarter after peers like Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon downsized aggressively earlier in 2023 as a weak economy put an end to their pandemic-led hiring sprees.

California-based Alphabet cut about 12,000 jobs in January, reducing its workforce by 6%. Layoffs in the U.S. rose more than threefold in August from July and nearly fourfold compared with a year ago, according to a report by employment firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

Earlier, In January, Google’s parent company Alphabet announced that it is cutting 12,000 jobs, or 6% of its global workforce.

The company stated that while the layoffs will occur in all regions and hit most units, they may affect teams such as recruiting more.

The layoff followed tech giants such as Microsoft (LinkedIn’s parent company), which announced layoffs, as well as the likes of Meta and Amazon.

The move of layoffs is part of a larger trend of tech companies cutting jobs and slowing hiring as investors become increasingly fearful of a recession. Tech companies have either frozen the hiring process or laid off many employees. 

Amazon sacked 27,000 employees in the last three months. The major companies that laid off employees include Infosys, Amazon, Google, Byju’s, Wipro, and Salesforce laid off a maximum number of workers globally.

So far in 2023, there have been 1,542 layoffs at tech companies with 351,607 people impacted (1,368 people per day). In 2022, there were 1,557 layoffs at tech companies 243,318 people impacted (667 people per day).