Alphabet, the parent company of technology giant Google, is axing jobs from its worldwide hiring team, reported Reuters. 

The company is shedding a few hundred staff as hiring remains low.

The latest job cuts are not part of a wide-scale redundancy plan and the technology firm will keep a sizable portion of the staff to fill key positions.

Google will also help the affected employees search for jobs both within the organisation and outside. 

Alphabet is the first “Big Tech” business to lay off workers in this quarter.

Earlier this year, its competitors such as Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon announced significant downsizing of the workforce as a slow economy ended their pandemic-driven recruiting sprees.

In January, Google announced that it is cutting some 12,000 jobs citing a difficult economic environment.

The latest news comes as Google faces an antitrust trial from the US government for allegedly abusing its dominance by monopolising the search engine industry.

Earlier this week, the US Department of Justice (DOJ) and a group of state attorneys commenced a landmark trial against Google.

The ten-week court battle, which might alter how the search engine functions now, is the US government’s first monopoly lawsuit to go to trial in the modern internet era.

In his opening statement to the court on the first day of the trial, DOJ attorney Kenneth Dintzer stated: “This case is about the future of the internet and whether Google’s search engine will ever face meaningful competition.”

The DOJ claims that Google has unjustly eliminated competition by illegally conducting its business activities to ensure that it is always the first search engine people see when they open their computer browsers.

Meanwhile, Google contended that the DOJ was incorrect in asserting that the firm had broken the law in its commercial transactions.