14 DAY TRIAL // At the beginning of the year, Google made it very clear that it plans to hire more people in 2011 than ever before. Not that it's lacking from people wanting to get a spot at the company, it received tens of thousands of applications within a week of the announcement, but Google, like everyone else, wants the best of the best so it's always touting how great it is to work at the company.
It seems to be paying off though, Google has been adding new people like there's no tomorrow, in fact, CEO Larry Page says that it's pretty much at the upper limit of how many people it can hire at any given time.
This quarter, it passed the 30,000 people mark and went way past it actually, it ended the third quarter with 31,353 people, needless to say, the biggest number it's ever seen.
Google started the year with 24,400 employees, so it's added 7,000 people in the first nine months of the year. If this keeps up, it should be ending the year with 9,000 maybe even 10,000 more employees.
To date, Google has hired 6,000 people in its biggest year, it's already past that.
Of course, that's saying nothing about the Motorola Mobility people, which will become Google employees when and if the acquisition is approved.
Motorola Mobility has 19,000 employees, but that's a rather old, 2010 figure. Of course, Motorola is not hiring at the rate Google is, so it should be accurate.
At that point, Google will blow past the 50,000 employees mark, a significant number any way you look at it. That said, IMB has many times that, 426,000 people.
In any case, hiring is not slowing down. During the conference call after the earnings report for the third quarter, Larry Page talked quite a bit about the growth process.
"People are a crucial part of Google’s long term success because great companies are no greater than the efforts and ingenuity of their employees," he said.
"So our goal is to hire the best people at every level, and keep them at Google. But hiring has to be manageable if we are to balance our short and long term needs," he added.
"You may have noticed quite substantial hiring this quarter, driven in part by a lot of university graduates," he explained the influx.
"Despite this seasonal effect the total number of people we hired was about the same as last quarter. Our attrition remains low which is great, though obviously contributes to our overall headcount," he also boasted.
"As I’ve said previously, I continue to believe that our headcount growth is at the edge of what’s manageable," Page concluded.