Google, the company that always seems to be hiring, has finally started firing. And it's starting with the people responsible for the hiring.

The search giant said today that it planned to let go about 100 recruiters. The cuts were first reported by Valleywag and quickly confirmed on the Official Google Blog by Laszlo Bock, the company's vice president of people operations. Bock wrote:

As we made clear during our last quarterly earnings call in October, Google is still hiring but at a reduced rate. Given the state of the economy, we recognized that we needed fewer people focused on hiring. Our first step to address this was to wind down almost all our contracts with external contractors and vendors providing recruiting services for Google. However, after much consideration, we have with great regret decided that we need to go further and reduce the overall size of our recruiting organization by approximately 100 positions.

What's more, Google said in another post (blogs are apparently supplanting e-mail as the preferred method of disseminating corporate news) that it was closing engineering offices in Austin, Texas; Trondheim, Norway; and Lulea, Sweden. Alan Eustace, senior vice president ...