In an email sent to employees on Tuesday, Mr. Pichai said Google would be “slowing the pace of hiring for the rest of the year, while still supporting our most important opportunities.” Google hired about 10,000 new employees in the second quarter and more who are committed to start this quarter, he added.

Parent company Alphabet reported 163,906 employees as of the end of March, up 17% from a year earlier.

“Moving forward, we need to be more entrepreneurial, working with greater urgency, sharper focus, and more hunger than we’ve shown on sunnier days,” Mr. Pichai wrote in the email. “In some cases, that means consolidating where investments overlap and streamlining processes. In other cases, that means pausing deployment and re-deploying resources to higher priority areas.”

Google joins other tech companies big and small that are scaling back expansion of their staff as rising inflation and other economic challenges contribute to a cooldown in the tech sector.

Microsoft Corp. said on Tuesday it would cut a small percentage of its staff, attributing the layoffs to regular adjustments at the start of its fiscal year. Before that, Facebook -parent Meta Platforms Inc.’s head of engineering told managers to identify and push out low performing employees, according to an internal post. Snap Inc. CEO Evan Spiegel also recently told staff the company would slow hiring, warning that the economy “has definitely deteriorated further and faster than we expected.”