The email came last night to customers and it was a bit of a shock. Hire by Google, the much loved Applicant Tracking System they launched 2 years ago will be discontinued by September 2020.

While Hire has been successful, we’re focusing our resources on other products in the Google Cloud portfolio. We are deeply grateful to our customers, as well as the champions and advocates who have joined and supported us along the way.

Google Email to Customers

Speculation about why is running rampant in social recruiting groups. Some expressed surprise because the product had a really good reputation among its SMB customer base. Being integrated into its G Suite of products make it a very easy to use service, and Google had been iterating on it with new features.

One user on Facebook said, “It’s a pity – we’ve been using it since February and the effectiveness was there with the integration with all of the Google ecosystems”.

Another wrote, “Really interesting. I know Google does this often, and this is non-core, but we keep hearing good things about this product. It’s one of a small handful of ATSs that people seem to really like, consistently. And their content is brilliant.”

From my perspective it seems that Google probably realized that the ATS market is highly competitive and looking at the business (they charged between $200-$400/month) thought it wasn’t big enough to maintain the product.

Google has a history of shutting down projects. But this one is surprising given their recent push into the jobs space with their job search and cloud search solutions. One quote I saw kinda summed it up;

“It’s looking increasingly crazy to be a business and have to rely on Google for anything.”

It also begs the question, what will they shut down next?

Oh and that cheer you hear is the rest of the ATS market breathing a sigh of relief with a big competitor out of the picture.