Google lays off hundreds on recruiting team | Hacker News Reader

Google lays off hundreds on recruiting team

semafor.com

58 pointsmfiguiere21 comments

From other website:

"While Google has been in cost-cutting mode since last year, Alphabet reported a 7% increase in second-quarter revenue, which was better than analysts expected"

From what I've heard it's been incredibly difficult to get a new hire approved in some divisions for some years now, despite wide spread acknowledgement of being understaffed.

Is it really understaffed though? It’s exactly as a staffed as intended. It’s not like a hospital where people die if you don’t have capacity.

You just release features slower.

> “In order to continue our important work to ensure we operate efficiently, we’ve made the hard decision to reduce the size of our recruiting team."

I get the use of the sort of appeal-to-emotion word "hard" in this context, but if it's a necessary business decision then it's problem not a hard one. Just feels a bit disingenuous to me, as I don't think throwing that word will likely make anyone feel better.

It's absolutely a hard decision, even if an objectively correct one.

It impacts hundreds of people and their families.

I see no reason to believe the sentiment ("appeal-to-emotion") is untruthful.

I hope all affected are able to find good resolutions.

It's "hard" in the same sense that Michael deciding to whack Sal in The Godfather was hard.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFqgRFal35A

Weird analogy to murder, but I guess so

It's just business for all of them. Nothing hard about it at all.

Yeah, even if we assume the decision is coming from a complete sociopath, there's still, somewhere on the line, someone saying 'look, are you sure about this?'

These companies are heartless.

People in the chain, much less so.

"hard" in this case doesn't mean complexity, it means difficulty in an emotional sense

"We’ve solved the NP-hard decision problem of reducing the size of our recruiting team in polynomial time, thus proving P=NP."

Surely firing N people is at most linear time. Possibly lower, if you can get economies of scale by caching the paperwork.

O(1) for that guy that just fired everyone during a zoom meeting.

Apologies; I wasn't very serious in my previous comment. I'm not sure how layoff algorithms work, but it is most likely polynomial. Firing people would be linear/sub-linear but candidate selection is probably a bit heavier.

Maybe a little extra overhead too for paying MBB to suggest Google's GRAD and SCI programs.

It's absolutely disingenuous. The public doesn't care if Google employees are emotionally suited for their management roles or not!

Wonder how likely is it that this is because of AI taking over the jobs. Sifting through resumes, contacting candidates, schedule some interviews, connect the hiring manager to the candidate, even getting some extra information from the candidate via email or phone calls are all things an LLM can efficiently do. They may actually do it even better than a regular human since they might "know" more about the role and the technical requirements than an average HR clerk...

While efficient, I’m not sure that removing the final human touch from what is otherwise a faceless, dehumanizing process is going to be great for candidates.

Google (and most other mid-large tech companies) leverage a ton of resume sorting, list building, auto-templatized outreach, etc.

Not sure the gap here is that large, but certainly recruiters have the tools to be WAY more efficient than they were in the past. Still their scaling is limited by ability to efficiently turn hiring manager requests and nuance into effective searches for tools to help build those lists.

Hiring is way less tight than it was a year ago. Even if Google had continued to hire at their previous pace, the number of positions each recruiter can hire likely increased.

With AI, you can do more with the same amount of resources. In terms of head-count I'm betting we saw the peak of the tech industry. I don't think this is just a "regular" recession. Much the same way manufacturing left the US, and came back transformed. I don't think tech comes back the same.

This is interesting. Afair the hr/recruiting org rolled up into the CFO . Must just be a coincidence that Ruth gets out of the CFO role (into chief investment officer) and then the hr layoffs start. What better way to build more of your creds/good will with wall st while not having the layoffs attributed to you as you are "no longer" the CFO?

https://fortune.com/2023/07/26/google-cfo-search-ruth-porat-...

Actually the transition hasn't completed yet!

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