Search engine giant Google has warned its employees against layoffs if the third quarter results are not as expected, The New York Post reported. The employees at the Google Cloud sales department have claimed having received a message saying if third quarter results don't look up, ‘there will be blood on the streets’.
The employees told the news site Insider they were really scared of being fired after the company extended its hiring freeze this month without an announcement.
The search engine giant's revenue growth in the past quarter had deaccelerated to its slowest pace in two years, Associated Press had reported. The array of new challenges facing the industry has already caused the tech-driven Nasdaq composite index to plummet by 26% so far this year.
Chief Executive Officer Sundar Pichai told employees last month that—although the business added 10,000 Googlers in the second quarter—it will be slowing the pace of hiring for the rest of the year and prioritizing engineering and technical talent, Bloomberg had reported.
“Like all companies, we’re not immune to economic headwinds,” he said. The hiring pause announced Wednesday is part of that slowdown, Google said, “to enable teams to prioritize their roles and hiring plans for the rest of the year.” It had nearly 164,000 employees at the end of March.
"Moving forward, we need to be more entrepreneurial, working with greater urgency, sharper focus, and more hunger than we’ve shown on sunnier days. In some cases, that means consolidating where investments overlap and streamlining processes. In other cases, that means pausing development and re-deploying resources to higher priority areas. Making the company more efficient is up to all of us -- we’ll be creating more ways for you all to engage and share ideas to help, so stay tuned," Pichai's memo to the Google staff sent last month reads.