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By Stephen Shankland, 27 March 2009 14:26

NEWS

Google is eliminating about 200 sales and marketing jobs, the company said in a blog post on Thursday, blaming the move on overlapping areas and over hiring during a more optimistic time.

"Today we have informed Googlers that we plan to reduce the number of roles within our sales and marketing organisations by just under 200 globally," said Omid Kordestani, senior vice president of global sales and business development, in the blog post. "We did look at a number of different options but ultimately concluded that we had to restructure our organisations in order to improve our effectiveness and efficiency as a business."

Those losing their jobs will get severance and a crack at other openings at the company, which had 20,222 employees at the end of December.

"Google has grown very quickly in a very short period of time. When companies grow that quickly it's almost impossible to get everything right - and we certainly didn't. In some areas we've created overlapping organisations which not only duplicate effort but also complicate the decision-making process. That makes our teams less effective and efficient than they should be. In addition, we over-invested in some areas in preparation for the growth trends we were experiencing at the time," Kordestani said.

Google has shaken up even Silicon Valley with its fast growth in revenue, size, and ambition, but it's not immune to the global economic woes, and it's been trying to improve its profitability by cutting underperforming projects such as a print advertising initiative. Last year, Google started paring back its contractor workforce, and this year, Google cut 100 recruiters, and 40 in a cancelled radio ad effort.