Google's hiring may have slowed, but it's still adding thousands of new employees

If you dream of working at Google, consistently voted as the best place to work, your chances might be better than you think.

Although Google just told Wall Street analysts that its been slowing its hiring in order to clamp down on expenses, Google has still been growing its employee headcount every quarter.

Google finished its second quarter with 57,100 full-time employees, up 18% versus the same quarter last year (in straight numbers, it had 52,000 full-time employees this time last year) and up 3% versus the first quarter this year (it ended the first quarter with 55,400 full-time employee, management said).

And it's hiring a lot right now as the company recruits new college grads, CFO Ruth Porat told Wall Street analysts during the quarterly conference call.

That said, one of Porat's missions is to reign in expenses while still investing in growth, she said.

Barclay's analyst Paul Vogel said in a research note that Google's rate of hiring has slowed over the past few years. An 18% year-over-year uptick in headcount last quarter is a bit less from 20% in Q1 2015, and 22% for FY 2014 - even though that still means Google added over 5,000 people last year alone, which means, on average 1,275 people every 90 days.

Since late last year, hiring is no longer like an open barn door, with managers allowed to add people as they see fit. Google executives are limited to hiring for the groups considered to be Google's strategic priorities.

Since late last year, many Google teams now have to justify hiring, telling execs how new employees will help the group hit a business objective such as grow revenue or users, reports the Wall Street Journal.

Porat explained:

I think a valuable framework to use is one that Eric and Larry have referred to for many years, namely the 70/20/10, 70% resources on the core 20% on adjacent areas, one point that included Chrome and Android and they are now in the core but it would include things like cloud and then 10% in additional new exciting opportunities in really sizable markets like Fiber or what we're doing with Google Life Sciences.

In fact, she called out Fiber, Google Life Sciences, and Nest as areas where "we are focused on tight governance to ensure that the resourcing for them is appropriate," because Google views them as " longer-term sources of revenue."

As for who Google is hiring, one area specifically discussed was data center jobs. Not only does Google need data center experts to run its ever-growing, sprawling data centers, it also needs such experts for its new cloud computing business, and for projects like Google Fiber.

Google's job site lists a good 150 data center job openings right now.