Google Sheds Hundreds of Recruiters in Another Round of Layoffs
The tech giant has sought to trim expenses to pay for artificial intelligence investments; it had earlier cut 12,000 jobs in January.
Google conducted another round of layoffs on Wednesday, telling its recruiters that by the end of the day hundreds of them would be losing their jobs, three people with knowledge of the layoffs said.
Google’s recruiting group, which at one point had more than 3,000 employees, has already been hit hard by layoffs this year.
The cuts are an indication that Google and its parent company, Alphabet, will continue the belt-tightening that began at the Silicon Valley company this year, even as it doubles down on investments in artificial intelligence.
Courtenay Mencini, a Google spokeswoman, said in a statement, “We’ve made the hard decision to reduce the size of our recruiting team,” because the volume of requests for the company’s recruiters has gone down.
“As we’ve said, we continue to invest in top engineering and technical talent while also meaningfully slowing the pace of our overall hiring,” she added.
The cuts are not believed to be part of wide-scale layoffs, but other parts of the company could also decide to reduce positions.
For more than a year, Sundar Pichai, Google’s chief executive, has rallied employees behind an effort to trim expenses and boost productivity. In January, Google followed peers like Amazon and Meta, and announced it was cutting 12,000 jobs, or 6 percent of its work force, marking the first significant layoffs in the company’s history. As of June 30, the company has 181,798 employees.
Google reaches $93 million settlement in tracking location case
Google has reached a $93 million settlement with the state of California to resolve allegations that it was collecting consumers’ data without their consent, the state’s attorney general said in a statement Thursday.
The California Department of Justice found that, after a multi-year investigation, the tech giant was “deceiving users by collecting, storing, and using their location data for consumer profiling and advertising purposes without informed consent.”
California Attorney General Rob Bonta also said Google accepted taking future actions to prevent those practices. These actions would apply beyond California to other states, according to the proposed order.
“Consistent with improvements we’ve made in recent years, we have settled this matter, which was based on outdated product policies that we changed years ago,” a Google spokesperson said.
The company pointed to a 2022 blog post which introduced transparency tools, such as auto-delete controls and incognito mode on Google Maps.
Google’s location-based advertising is an important part of its business because companies want to cater their content based on who lives where, the state said. The state also said that Google factors in location in its “behavioral profile” of users.
Bonta had alleged Google wasn’t truthful about its location collection and storage tactics. For example, the original complaint said that Google continued to collect and store location data even when users turned off the “location history” setting, just in different ways.
As part of the settlement, Google would have to be more transparent about its location tracking and disclose to users that their location information could be used for targeted ads. The proposed order is subject to court approval, the state’s attorney general said.
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