Google said Thursday that it would cut about 200 employees from its sales and marketing organization, the third and most significant round of layoffs at the company this year.
Google, which announced the layoffs in a blog post, said that the cuts would reduce overlap between different groups and speed up decision making.
Omid Kordestani, Google’s senior vice president for global sales and business development, said the cuts were meant to address mistakes the company had made during its phase of rapid growth. “In some areas we’ve created overlapping organizations which not only duplicate effort but also complicate the decision-making process,” Mr. Kordestani wrote on Google’s corporate blog. “That makes our teams less effective and efficient than they should be. In addition, we over-invested in some areas in preparation for the growth trends we were experiencing at the time.”
The cuts suggest that the deepening global recession is affecting some parts of Google’s business more severely than the company anticipated just two months ago. In January, after Google laid off 100 recruiters, Eric Schmidt, the company’s chief executive, said that deeper cuts were “unlikely.” In February, the company cut another 40 positions when it closed its radio advertising efforts.
About 100 of the eliminated positions will be in the United States and the rest overseas, said Matt Furman, a Google spokesman. Mr. Furman said the company continued to hire new workers, albeit at a slow rate. In the fourth quarter of 2008, the company grew by 99 workers, ending the year with 20,222 full-time employees. In previous years, Google had added more than 2,000 people in a single quarter.
Laid-off workers will be given time to apply for other jobs within the company.
The layoffs this year are neither the first nor the largest in Google’s history. Last April, Google cut about 300 positions from the American operations of DoubleClick, which it acquired earlier in 2008.
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