What if these companies did not hire some concrete number of people but had a pipeline set up to pass a certain fraction of applicants? Seeing how people get hi

What if these companies did not hire some concrete number of people but had a pipeline set up to pass a certain fraction of applicants? Seeing how people get hired by Google, for example, and then get into a "team assignment" it certainly looks to be a possibility. Then, what happens when the stock price doubles over two years and a significant fraction of the compensation is pegged to the stock price? Compensation grows too. And when compensation grows they get more applicants, I'd imagine. It's not like they had been getting few before but their hiring pipeline had been set up for the old rate of applicants, if this suddenly grew, they'd naturally get more hires. Especially considering that the additional applicants come from a cohort that had been compensated well enough to resist the pre-stock doubling comp numbers. When the headcount had hit backstops, some hard headcount limits they likely have had, only then they realized how much did they hire and now react to this by doing layoffs and, probably, revising their HR policies.