(Bloomberg) — As major U.S. tech companies lay off employees, popular short-form video platform TikTok is still hiring. The company said it will add about 3,000 engineers around the world and expand its Mountain View, California, office.
While Silicon Valley tech companies are laying off workers, TikTok is bucking the trend. It is embarking on a three-year hiring program that promises to add about 3,000 engineers around the world.
According to people familiar with TikTok’s plans, the company will be hiring in places like Singapore, in addition to the United States. In addition, TikTok’s parent company, ByteTok, is also hiring people in China to work on the TikTok platform.
TikTok Chief Executive Officer Zhou Shucheng Zhou said TikTok is still insisting on hiring, though it is also moving forward cautiously, amid significant layoffs by some competitors.
“We’ve been cautious in hiring,” Zhou said, “We’re still hiring, but the pace of hiring has to be commensurate with the global challenges we’re facing.”
TikTok does not yet have an official headquarters, but the company has major offices in Los Angeles and New York in the United States, Dublin in Ireland, London in the United Kingdom, and Singapore. CEO Chow is based primarily in Singapore. tikTok has a global headcount of more than 20,000 employees, with about a quarter of them working in the United States.
TikTok plans to expand its largest U.S. engineering center in Mountain View, California, where it already employs more than 1,000 engineers, according to people familiar with the matter. In some cases, the number of people TikTok has hired has approached the number of employees recently laid off by rivals like Facebook’s parent company Meta and Twitter.
Of course, the economic climate has also had a negative impact on TikTok’s business. The company plans to cut its ad revenue target for the year from at least $12 billion to $10 billion, Chow told employees at a recent online meeting.
TikTok’s staffing goal is now to hire at a more moderate pace than in previous years, people familiar with the matter said. As with all companies, TikTok’s hiring plans may be adjusted again based on the general economic environment and the company’s business performance.
TikTok has only been around for about five years since it was founded, and its growth trajectory is quite different from that of many traditional U.S. tech companies that are undergoing massive layoffs. In some ways, TikTok is already more popular than Meta’s Facebook and Instagram, and even more so with its U.S. teenage user base. But Meta’s revenue in 2021 is $118 billion, and TikTok’s revenue is a fraction of Meta’s.
In recent months, TikTok’s competitors have launched their biggest layoffs in years, with Facebook’s parent company, Meta, planning to cut about 11,000 jobs and Amazon likely to lay off 10,000. Twitter, Lyft and other companies have also announced layoffs. To be clear, the mass layoffs are not affecting the ability of these companies to hire for key positions.
In 2020, TikTok says it will hire 10,000 U.S. employees. According to people familiar with the company’s hiring plans, the company is still hiring engineers to improve the features users can see on the app and to improve the infrastructure that makes the TikTok app work, such as the recommendation algorithm.
TikTok also plans to hire more employees for its commercialization team and its newly formed e-commerce team, some of the people familiar with the matter said. The company’s commercialization team is responsible for working on how to make money from the TikTok app. The sources also said TikTok plans to add contract workers to its content review centers in the U.S. and Dublin, Ireland, to monitor the app for inappropriate video content.
TikTok’s parent company, ByteTok, also continues to hire employees in China, according to people familiar with the matter. Some of the new hires will work on the TikTok platform, while others will develop chips for ByteTok.
People familiar with the matter also said that ByteTok is moving some employees from the Chinese market to work in Singapore, but the execution has been slower than expected. The main reason is that there is very little local talent in Singapore, in addition to the work visa approval is more complicated.
It was recently reported that ByteDance released a financial report to the company’s employees in August this year. The report showed that the company achieved an operating profit in the first quarter of fiscal 2022 after years of huge losses.
Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)
