Google cuts 200 jobs from sales and marketing

Recession bites deep.

Google has made its first large scale redundancies today, chopping 200 staff from its sales and marketing divisions.

The company has said that it has grown very quickly and some duplication of roles has occurred as a result. Therefore it is making the layoffs to streamline its organisation.

“So today we have informed Googlers that we plan to reduce the number of roles within our sales and marketing organizations by just under 200 globally,” said a posting on the company blog.

“Making changes of this kind is never easy—and we recognize that the recession makes the timing even more difficult for the Googlers concerned. We did look at a number of different options but ultimately concluded that we had to restructure our organizations in order to improve our effectiveness and efficiency as a business.”

The company has not specified exactly which global regions will be hit by the layoffs but it is thought that the bulk of them will be made in the US since regional teams overseas are already fairly tightly organized.

Employees are reported to be getting a 60 day consultancy period during which they can apply for other jobs within the company before getting a severance package.

Google, which is still posting good financial results, is the latest in a long line of technology firms in the expectation of a worsening economic climate.