Following last week’s news that it was to cut hundreds of staff from its Augmented Reality (AR) division, Google has just announced a fresh wave of redundancies. This time within its advertising sales team.
According to Google, the layoffs are part of a restructure that will help facilitate the “best possible service to our Ads customers”.
The news comes following significant job cuts at both Amazon and Duolingo in recent weeks, further confirming the concerning 2024 trend for tech redundancies.
Restructuring Specialist Teams
Around 1,000 Google employees in the AR, Pixel, Nest, and Fitbit teams got the news last week that their jobs were no more. Following this, “a few hundred roles globally” across the ad sales division are also being eliminated, this time owing to structural changes within the team.
According to Google spokesperson Chris Pappas:
“Every year we go through a rigorous process to structure our team to provide the best service to our Ads customers. We map customers to the right specialist teams and sales channels to meet their service needs. As part of this, a few hundred roles globally are being eliminated and impacted employees will be able to apply for open roles or elsewhere at Google.”
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Better Support For SMEs
The news was delivered to staff via a memo from Google senior vice president Philipp Schindler, which also seemed to outline the restructure plans.
The redundancies mostly affect its Large Customer Sales unit, who are the team that sell ads to large businesses. As a result, the Google Customer Solutions team – those who sell to smaller clients – are now set to become the core ad sales team.
According to the tech giant, jobs cuts specifically in this area are intended to bring about better support for small and medium sized businesses advertising on Google. So much so, that the changes could actually result in increased hiring across the customer support team.
More Cuts To Come?
This time last year, Google cut around 12,000 jobs, reducing its workforce by roughly 6%. With layoffs remaining somewhat consistent throughout 2023, and now into 2024, speculation remains that this won’t be the last wave of cuts.
According to a company statement, Google said: “We’re responsibly investing in our company’s biggest priorities and the significant opportunities ahead. To best position us for these opportunities, throughout the second half of 2023, a number of our teams made changes to become more efficient and work better, and to align their resources to their biggest product priorities.”
