Search engine Google is slashing 100 recruiters from its rolls, the company’s vice president for people operations has announced.

In a statement on Google’s official blog, Laszlo Bock said the decision had been taken “with great regret”.

Bock referred to the company’s last quarterly earnings announcement in October, in which it had confirmed it was still hiring “but at a reduced rate. Given the state of the economy, we recognised that we needed fewer people focused on hiring. Our first step was to wind down almost all our contracts with external contractors and vendors providing recruiting services for Google. However, we have decided that we need to go further and reduce the overall size of our recruiting organisation by approximately 100 positions.”

Google also announced that it is stopping development of a variety of products including a social networking service for mobile phones and Google Notebook.