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Google layoffs continue with ‘hundreds’ from sales team

Google layoffs continue with ‘hundreds’ from sales team

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Google’s most recent round of job cuts impacts a ‘few hundred roles globally.’

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Illustration of Google’s wordmark, written in red and pink on a dark blue background.
Illustration: The Verge

After laying off about 1,000 employees last week, Google is now cutting jobs on its advertising sales team. In a statement to The Verge, Google spokesperson Chris Pappas confirmed that “a few hundred roles globally are being eliminated” as part of the change.

The news of Google’s latest layoffs was first reported by Business Insider, which obtained a memo from Google senior vice president Philipp Schindler. Schindler reportedly hinted the layoffs will primarily affect its Large Customer Sales (LCS) unit, a team that sells ads to large businesses, while the Google Customer Solutions team (GCS), which sells ads to smaller clients, will become the “core” ad sales team instead. Google laid off some employees on its LCS team last October, according to a separate report from Business Insider.

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

That tracks with a report from my colleague Alex Heath, who wrote in The Verge’s Command Line newsletter that last week’s layoffs wouldn’t be the end, adding that “the roughly 30,000-person ad sales group is another natural target.” Google has already made sweeping cuts across several parts of its company, affecting the employees working on Pixel, Fitbit, and Nest products as well as those on its engineering and Google Assistant teams.

Google still hasn’t put a number on how many employees it has laid off this year. But with last week’s layoffs affecting “a few hundred” roles in each impacted division and this most recent round eliminating another “few hundred” jobs, the cuts have certainly climbed above 1,000.