TikTok owner Bytedance has started a new round of hiring, looking to add around 10,000 employees to its global ranks, according to a Bloomberg report on Wednesday.
Why it matters: The Beijing-based internet giant is moving towards a target of creating 40,000 new jobs this year to reach a goal of 100,000 employees globally. Once it achieves that goal, the startup’s headcount will be on par with e-commerce behemoth Alibaba’s, and exceed WeChat owner Tencent’s by around 58%.
- The job openings also provide a picture of the secretive app factory’s plans for growth. For example, it is hiring more than 400 people to fill positions related to games after building a gaming division numbering more than 1,000 employees as of late January.
Details: Bytedance has launched a recruiting campaign and asked employees to provide candidate referrals for 10,000 open positions, according to Bloomberg, citing information from an internal website.
- Around one-third of the open positions are high-level research or software coding jobs, according to the report.
- Some 7,662 open positions are listed on Bytedance’s publicly accessible career website as of Wednesday, according to TechNode’s observations. While most of the openings are located in Chinese cities such as Beijing and Shanghai, the rest are scattered between Bytedance’s major offices overseas including Singapore, London, and New York.
- Of the 10,000 vacancies, 9,900 are located in China, according to Bloomberg.
Context: Bytedance’s global headcount has exceeded 60,000 and the number is expected to reach 100,000 by the end of the year, Zhang Yiming, company founder and CEO, said in an internal letter in March.
- The company said in July that its apps, including short video app TikTok and domestic version Douyin, as well as news aggregator Jinri Toutiao, had 1.5 billion monthly active users globally as of end-June.
- Bytedance’s new massive hiring program comes as global tech companies, including hotel chain Oyo and co-working space WeWork, are cutting staff or freezing hiring as a result of the global Covid-19 outbreak.
- Meanwhile, Tencent has some 5,531 job openings on its career website and Alibaba has around 7,700 as of Wednesday.
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Wei Shang