A Recruitment Factory

Hiring the best people is usually very expensive. Fortunately for Google, the IT collapse that began in 2000 dumped thousands of trained IT specialists, in all disciplines and at all levels, back into the job market. In 2001, Motorola alone laid off one-quarter of its 150,000 employees. And the search engines weren't doing any better. In January 2001, then-leader AltaVista laid off 250 people, one-fourth of its staff, and canceled its plans to go public. Yahoo!, the other leader in the sector, also suffered large cutbacks. Sun Microsystems, General Electric, and Siemens laid off thousands more, and the list goes on.

Of course, most of those unemployed people didn't go to work for Google, but some of the best ones did. Google ...

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