Google Hire is Planned for Shutdown by September 2020

• Google announced that “Hire” will sunset on September 2020, and stops receiving payments for it by next month.
• Users will be allowed to use the service and extend their contracts until the final date.
• The data will be exportable free of charge in JSON format, which is compatible with most products of this kind.

Google has announced that the “Hire” service, a product that they launched only two years ago will shut its doors in twelve months from now, on September 1, 2020. Hire was a service that was meant to help recruiters of small to medium businesses identify and attract job candidates, manage the interviewing procedure, and bring all of the associated Google products (Gmail, Calendar, Docs, Sheets, Hangouts, Search) under a common and unified hiring platform. Available in the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada, Google claims that Hire was very successful, but they would like to focus their available resources on other products in the Google Cloud portfolio now.

This is just how things work in Google’s offices, as they are discontinuing services and products systematically. In total, 175 Google projects have been ceased, with the most notable this year being Google Trips, Google Hangouts, Gmail Inbox, Google Allo, Goo.gl, and their very own social media network, Google Plus. There are even websites that are devoted to the registering of the products that were “killed by Google”, and buried in the "Google Cemetery". In that sense, Hire isn’t anything special, but nonetheless, it was a service that was used and valued by thousands.

image source: hire.google.com

As Google clarified in the relevant announcement, the next bill will be the last that the subscribers of the service will be expected to pay. If your contract expires before September 1, 2020, Google is offering you an option to extend it until the sunsetting date by reaching out to the Hire support and submitting the relevant request. No additional functionality will be added until then, as expected, and no additional charges will be imposed on those who will terminate the agreement contract earlier. As for the user data, Google provides free data exporting services until the end of the contract terms or until September 1, 2020, so you can grab everything in JSON format and move to another solution.

Speaking of which, some popular alternatives of Google Hire are Zoho Recruit, BambooHR, JobDiva, ApplicantStack, and ZipRecruiter. That said, there are plenty of tools to help you with the hiring process in your company, but Google Hire was unique for the sole reason that it combined various Google products to offer a new level of integration. Losing this will be something irreplaceable for many out there but that's the way Google wants this to go.

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