Google lays off Googlers, for real

This time, it’s for real. Google has succumbed to the pressure of the global financial crisis and announced their first round of lay offs starting with the team that’s doing the hiring — the HR department.

The official Google blog announced the news today:

Given the state of the economy, we recognized that we needed fewer people focused on hiring. Our first step to address this was to wind down almost all our contracts with external contractors and vendors providing recruiting services for Google. However, after much consideration, we have with great regret decided that we need to go further and reduce the overall size of our recruiting organization by approximately 100 positions.

If a big 500-pound gorilla like Google feels the pressure and caved in, imagine what it felt like to smaller players in the industry.

Aside from this shocking piece of news, Google has also announced it will axe about half a dozen other projects — Dodgeball, Jaiku, Google Video, Notebook, Catalog Search and Mashup Editor.

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