Jul 18, 2011 11:11 GMT  ·  By

Google showed off a record quarter last week, with $9 billion in revenue in Q2, it had plenty to brag about. But Google is not only racking in the cash, it's also racking in new employees.

The company continued its hiring binge, which it announced at the start of the year, adding some 2,500 employees. Granted, 450 of those were ITA employees which became Google employees as the acquisition got approved by the US regulators.

"On a worldwide basis, Google employed 28,768 full-time employees as of June 30, 2011, up from 26,316 full-time employees as of March 31, 2011," the company revealed in its financial report at the end of Q2.

"Net headcount growth (excluding approximately 450 employees hired as part of the acquisition of ITA Software) was similar to the first quarter of 2011," it added.

But that still leaves Google with 2,000 hires in the three months since the end of March. The company says that the additions are in line with what it did in the first quarter of the year.

If Google manages to continue this sustained hiring rate, it will end up with more than 8,000 new employees at the end of the year, above its already ambitious goal of 6,000 hires.

Of course, the company may decide to slow down the hire rate, if it feels that it doesn't really need that many new people.

With the trouble tech companies in Silicon Valley have finding talented engineers, especially with the number of other companies growing very fast, most notably Facebook, perhaps it's best for Google to get as many people as it can.

The company is also doing its best to keep the employees it does have sticking around and one way of doing this is with stock-based compensation (SBC).

Google stock price has been falling for the last couple of years, but the strong second quarter, which was bigger than the estimates, pushed the stock price up by 12 percent in the next day.

"In the second quarter of 2011, the total charge related to SBC was $435 million, compared to $309 million in the second quarter of 2010," Google revealed.

"We currently estimate SBC charges for grants to employees prior to July 1, 2011 to be approximately $1.9 billion for 2011," it added.