Google's High-Stakes Battle: Tech Giant Offers 300% Salary Hike to Keep Talent

Google's recent layoffs made headlines earlier this year, but the tech giant is once again in the spotlight for its efforts to retain talent amidst high competition. In a recent episode of the Big Technology Podcast, Perplexity AI CEO Aravind Srinivas, who is also an IITian revealed that Google once offered a 300 per cent salary increase to dissuade an employee from joining his company.

The IIT Madras Alumni further mentioned that the employee who received the proposal for a salary increase was a member of the 'search team' and was not directly associated with its AI division.

Layoffs in 2024

Besides Google, many tech firms, present both globally and in the domestic sphere, have been announcing major layoffs since the inception of this year.

In the first few weeks of 2024, Layoffs.fyi, a tech layoffs tracker, reported layoff figures exceeding 34,000 employees.

In a recent interview with Morning Brew Daily's podcast, Marc Zuckerberg highlighted that during the pandemic, e-commerce sales surged, leading to significant increases in online advertising revenue. However, as people resumed shopping in physical stores and the economy stabilized, sales growth slowed down, causing advertising rates to decrease.

He further said that many big tech firms (Meta included) realised the hard way that they had employed more staff than necessary and had to carry out significant layoffs.

In 2023, Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google's parent company Alphabet, announced plans to cut anywhere around 12,000 jobs, which accounted for around 6 per cent of its global workforce.