Silicon Valley Slump: Google Pauses All Hiring for Two Weeks

Google has announced a two-week hiring freeze at the company following a recent memo to employees revealing that there would be a slowing of their hiring process for the remainder of the year. The company-wide memo encouraged workers to “be more entrepreneurial” and work with “more hunger.”

TechCrunch reports that Google has announced that the company will be enacting a two-week hiring freeze. The news comes after Google announced last week that it would be slowing down its hiring process for the remainder of the year in order to reevaluate its hiring methods and practices.

Google reportedly hired almost 10,000 people in Q2 alone, with full-quarter results set to be published on July 26. In an email obtained by The Information, Prabhakar Raghavan, senior vice president at Google, said: “We’ll use this time to review our headcount needs and align on a new set of prioritized Staffing Requests for the next three months.”

The hiring freeze will not affect offers that Google has already made but will put a temporary halt on contract extensions. Google’s decision appears to align with an internal memo sent by CEO Sundar Pichai last week in which he stated that the company is looking to be “more entrepreneurial” and reshuffle workers’ priorities to focus on the most important projects at the company.

“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 prioritize their roles and hiring plans for the rest of the year,” a Google spokesperson told TechCrunch via email.

Other tech companies are also slowing their hiring process, with Facebook (now Meta) halting hiring across some of their engineering teams and issuing cutbacks at the company. CEO Mark Zuckerberg wanted employees that soon there would be fewer resources available at the company and they would have to work harder.

Read more at TechCrunch here.

Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan