Google Axes Hundreds Of Staff In Ad Sales Team

Alphabet’s Google continues the job loses misery this week, after confirming a fresh tranche of layoffs at its advertising sales team.

The fresh job losses were first reported by Business Insider, which obtained a memo from Google senior vice president Philipp Schindler, who reportedly said the layoffs would primarily impact Google’s Large Customer Sales (LCS) unit – the team that sells ads to large businesses.

It also reported that the Google Customer Solutions team (GCS), which sells ads to smaller clients, will become the “core” ad sales team instead. Previous reports have indicated that Google had laid off some staff on its LCS team last October.

Advertising sales

Google then confirmed the most recent as sales job losses to the Verge, after Google spokesperson Chris Pappas confirmed that “a few hundred roles globally are being eliminated” as part of the change.

“Every year we go through a rigorous process to structure our team to provide the best service to our Ads customers,” Pappas told The Verge.

“We map customers to the right specialist teams and sales channels to meet their service needs,” Pappas reportedly said. “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.”

Google is said to employ approximately 30,000 people in its ad sales group, but the tech giant has been busy axing jobs in other teams as well.

Last week for example Google confirmed it was laying off hundreds of employees across multiple teams.

In addition, Fitbit co-founders James Park and Eric Friedman exited the search engine giant, amid ongoing cost cutting measures.

It was understood that hundreds at Google’s Voice Assistant unit were being let go, and a few hundred roles were also being eliminated in the hardware team responsible for Pixel, Nest and Fitbit.

Hundreds of roles in the search giant’s central engineering team were also laid off.

In addition, the majority of people in the augmented reality (AR) team were let go, which reportedly pushed the total job losses last week above the 1,000 mark.

There has been no response on X (formerly Twitter) from the Alphabet Workers Union at the time of writing, after it had described the job cuts last week as “another round of needless layoffs.”

The trade union did however repost the Verge article on the ad sales job losses.

2023 job losses

And it should be remembered that Google had also culled thousands of jobs last year.

In January 2023 Alphabet had announced that it would cut 12,000 jobs worldwide, or roughly 6 percent of its workforce.

It came after Google had warned in October 2022 that it would cut hiring by half during Q4 of 2022.

Google staff last year walked out in protest at the jobs cuts, and criticised the company for abruptly cutting off access to those who lost their jobs in the January 2023 redundancies.

In June 2023 it also emerged that Google was axing staff in its highly popular mapping service Waze, which it had acquired for $1.3 billion back in 2013.

In September 2023 it was reported that Google was cutting hundreds of jobs in its global recruiting team as part of a broader pullback in hiring over the next several quarters.