On January 17, watch manufacutrer Fossil Group Inc. ($FOSL) said it will sell intellectual property of a developing smartwatch technology to Google ($GOOG) for $40 million, as well as a portion of the team that has been working on it for the company.
This comes at a time when Fossil has had its biggest hiring dip in the past three years, as a seemingly cyclical late December slowdown hit a low of 28 open positions.
When looking at Google's hiring data for the past six monts, it didn't seem as if the company was poised to make a big hiring splash. At most, the company was looking for 12 individual positions to be filled that explicitely stated it was for "Google Wear OS" or its former name "Android Wear."
The lack of job openings points towards a potential reason why Google brought on part of Fossil's smartwatch team as part of the deal. With this new tech comes a need for more researchers and developers, and although Alphabet, Google's parent company is a hiring powerhouse — they have thousands of job postings up every day — it's reasonable for them to bring in experienced workers who know the product well, especially as it apparently has features that aren't in wearable technology today.
