Google CEO Wants His Firm To Be 20% More Efficient, Hints At Job Cuts

Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said he wants to make the company 20% more efficient and that could include headcount cuts as it reckons with a slew of economic challenges as well as years of rapid hiring, Jennifer Elias reported for CNBC.

Photo Insert: While the Google and Alphabet CEO said he views macroeconomic factors as outside of his control, he acknowledged the company has become “slower” after its headcount ballooned.

Speaking at Code Conference in Los Angeles, Pichai gave more details about how he’s thinking of making the company run more efficiently ahead of economic uncertainty and a broader slowdown in ad spending, of which Google has been the largest beneficiary to date.

“The more we try to understand the macroeconomic, we feel very uncertain about it,” Pichai said on stage Tuesday. “The macroeconomic performance is correlated to ad spend, consumer spend, and so on,” he added.

While he said he views macroeconomic factors as outside of his control, Pichai acknowledged the company has become “slower” after its headcount ballooned.

“We want to make sure as a company when you have fewer resources than before, you are prioritizing all the right things to be working on and your employees are really productive that they can actually have impact on the things they’re working on so that’s what we are spending our time on.”

Host Kara Swisher asked the CEO how he planned to make the company more efficient, citing “Simplicity Sprint,” a recent internal project launched to re-focus the growing company and “get better results faster” as first reported by CNBC in July.

While revenue is still growing, the effort came after the company reported its second consecutive quarter of weaker-than-expected earnings and revenue.

However, prior to that, employees early in the year had given the company’s leadership particularly poor marks on pay, promotions, and execution, citing the company’s growing bureaucracy, which executives acknowledged at the time.

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