Overnight, it was announced that Google would be cutting “a few hundred roles globally” across its ad sales team. However, the Search giant expects to grow its customer support teams and increase the number of accounts that its teams work on.
A memo from Philipp Schindler, Google’s chief business officer seen by Business Insider, said that a “substantial channel shift” was coming and the company would be “regularly adjusting organisational structures based on customer needs, the overall market environment and available resourcing”.
These changes apparently necessitated the culling of “several hundred jobs”. As yet, it is unclear how many roles will be affected in Australia — or any country for that matter.
However, B&T understands that the roles will affect those working in Google’s Large Customers Sales (LCS) team and the rump of ad sales staff remaining will be spread more thinly across more accounts. Rather than focusing on the biggest businesses in the world, Google is shifting its focus to service small- to medium-sized clients.
The Google Customer Solutions (GCS) team, which makes up the remainder of Google’s ad sales, is set to grow, however, given that it is equipped to handle performance-oriented clients. This team also makes significant use of Google’s AI smarts to deliver sales experiences across the customer journey.
“Every year we go through a rigorous process to structure our team to provide the best service to our Ads customers,” said a Google spokesperson.
“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 on the team or elsewhere at Google”.
Google recently culled more than 1,000 roles across the division that houses the Pixel, Fitbit and NEst teams. The Alphabet Workers Union (AWU) — Alphabet being Google’s parent company — called the redundancies “unnecessary”.
“These firings are coming less than a year after Alphabet laid off 12,000 of our coworkers in 2023, and the terms of severance have only gotten worse. These layoffs are unnecessary and counterproductive. Alphabet says it is doing layoffs in the interest of efficiency, but we know the truth, because we see the real impacts,” said AWU president and Google software engineer Parul Koul.
“The layoffs introduce chaos and instability into the workplace and force workers to make do with less. The real reason for them is simple: corporate greed. In the last year, the company earned tens of billions in profit, held over $100 billion ($AU1.52 billion) in cash reserves, and raised its stock by 40 per cent. Executive pay has gone untouched, all while thousands of our coworkers have had their lives turned upside down and those that remain on the job work in constant anxiety that they will be next”.
Tech layoffs tend to follow periods of stock price decline and, since Christmas, Alphabet’s share price dropped some four per cent until 5 January. Since then, the share price has climbed by nearly five per cent — despite the announcement of two rounds of layoffs.
