Coronavirus impact: Microsoft reports 46% drop in recruitment\, Google freezes hiring

Coronavirus impact: Microsoft reports 46% drop in recruitment, Google freezes hiring

While Microsoft has almost halved its job openings in three weeks, its subsidiary LinkedIn has reduced vacancies from 510 to 2

Mansi Jaswal        Last Updated: April 22, 2020  | 01:47 IST
COVID-19 takes a toll on recruitments

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to disrupt global economies, firms across the world have stopped fresh hiring. Tech-giant Microsoft has reduced job openings to nearly half in just the past three weeks. According to data platform Thinknum, on March 22, 2020, Microsoft listed about 5,580 openings. By April 20, that number sunk to 3,028, a 46% drop in hiring activity.

LinkedIn, the Microsoft-owned professional network has seen an even more stark drop in hiring. On March 1, 2020, LinkedIn listed 510 openings. As of this week, LinkedIn shows only 2 openings for its entire business, the data platform added.

The hiring slowdown at Microsoft is across the board for the most part. Of the 20 categories for which the company hires, all have seen a drop in openings. However, the engineering sector is the least affected among the categories, according to Thinknum.

Google which hired 20,000 employees last year has decided to freeze hiring for the rest of 2020 amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

In an internal message, Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai said, "Now is the time to significantly slow down the pace of hiring, while maintaining momentum in a small number of strategic areas where users and businesses rely on Google for ongoing support, and where our growth is critical to their success".

Google is also believed to be recalibrating the focus and pace of its investments in areas like data centers and machines, and non-business essential marketing and travel.

Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, employer demand for workers has gone down significantly, especially from the second half of March and the trend in listings on the job site Indeed was over 30 percent lower as of April 10, 2020 compared to last year.

Jed Kolko, Chief Economist at the Indeed Hiring Lab, said in a blog post last week that new job postings are down by 49.1 per cent compared to 2019 as of April 10,2020.

On Monday, Microsoft-owned LinkedIn published a study that stated, a quarter of India's workforce (25 per cent) has reported a decrease in their incomes, while 39 per cent reported a dip in personal savings due to the impact of COVID-19 pandemic.