TikTok Is Still Hiring as Competitors Shed Jobs
Several of the world’s biggest tech companies are laying off employees. One company bucking the trend so far is TikTok.
Amid a retrenchment in Silicon Valley, the Chinese-owned social-media company is in the middle of a three-year hiring push, having committed to add about 3,000 engineers in worldwide locations including the U.S.
SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS
Is TikTok winning in the social-media space? Why or why not? Join the conversation below.
TikTok also is hiring at its major hub in Singapore, according to people familiar with its plans. TikTok’s owner, Beijing-based ByteDance Ltd., is also recruiting people in China to work on its TikTok platform. TikTok isn’t available in China, but ByteDance offers a Chinese alternative called Douyin.
TikTok Chief Executive Shou Zi Chew said this week that amid big downsizing at some of his competitors, TikTok was still hiring, though at a measured pace.
“We have always been more cautious in terms of recruitment,” Mr. Chew said at a Bloomberg-sponsored economic forum in Singapore. “We’re still hiring, although at the pace that we think has to correspond with the global challenges that we’re facing.”
Tech Layoffs
While closely held ByteDance is based in Beijing, TikTok has no official headquarters. It has major offices in Los Angeles, New York, Dublin, London and Singapore, where Mr. Chew is based. ByteDance employs about 130,000 workers worldwide. TikTok employs more than 20,000, with about a quarter of that number in the U.S.
TikTok plans to increase the size of its biggest American engineering hub, in Mountain View, Calif., which already has more than 1,000 engineers, according to people familiar with the hiring. In some cases, TikTok recruiters have approached people recently laid off from rivals including
Meta Platforms Inc.
and Twitter Inc. The hiring plans and outreach was reported earlier by the Information.
TikTok hasn’t been immune to the economic headwinds buffeting its rivals. It lowered its target for this year’s advertising revenue to $10 billion from at least $12 billion, Mr. Chew told staff in a recent online meeting.
In 2020, TikTok said it would hire 10,000 U.S. workers; company offices in Los Angeles.
Photo:
Jessica Pons for The Wall Street Journal
The company now aims to hire at a milder pace compared with previous years, people familiar with the plans said. As with any company, TikTok’s plans could change again depending on economic conditions and business performance.
TikTok, which is roughly only five years old, is on a different growth trajectory than many of the older American tech giants that are now shedding thousands of jobs. By some measures, TikTok has surpassed Facebook and Meta-owned Instagram in popularity, especially among American teens. But TikTok still brings in a fraction of the revenue of Meta, which had $118 billion in sales in 2021.
Some more established Silicon Valley rivals have embarked on the biggest job cuts the industry has endured in years. Facebook-owner Meta is laying off about 11,000 employees, while
Amazon.com Inc.
could cut up to 10,000. Twitter,
Lyft Inc.
and other companies have also announced layoffs. Those cuts don’t preclude other hiring for key roles at TikTok rivals.
In 2020, TikTok said it would hire 10,000 U.S. workers, a move that came as it faced growing scrutiny in Washington over its Chinese roots and its access to information about the millions of Americans that use the app.
For now, the company is still recruiting engineers both to improve features that users see on the app, and to improve the algorithm and other behind-the-scenes infrastructure that make TikTok work, according to people familiar with its hiring plans.
The company also plans to add employees to its commercialization team, which figures out how to make money from the app, and its nascent e-commerce team, some of these people said. TikTok also plans to add contractors who would monitor the app for inappropriate videos, in both the U.S. and at a content-moderation hub in Dublin, Ireland, they said.
TikTok’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance, is continuing to recruit people in China, too, according to people familiar with those plans. Some of the new hires would work on TikTok, while others would help ByteDance develop chips.
ByteDance has also been shifting some roles from China to Singapore, in part to address Washington’s concerns about TikTok’s ties to China, according to some of these people. The pace has been slower than expected, they said, because Singapore has a smaller talent pool than China and because of complications in acquiring work visas.
ByteDance in August shared a financial report with employees that indicated that after years of large losses, it turned an operating profit in 2022’s first quarter, The Wall Street Journal recently reported.
Yang Jie contributed to this article.
Write to Raffaele Huang at [email protected] and Stu Woo at [email protected]
Copyright ©2022 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8
Several of the world’s biggest tech companies are laying off employees. One company bucking the trend so far is TikTok.
Amid a retrenchment in Silicon Valley, the Chinese-owned social-media company is in the middle of a three-year hiring push, having committed to add about 3,000 engineers in worldwide locations including the U.S.
SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS
Is TikTok winning in the social-media space? Why or why not? Join the conversation below.
TikTok also is hiring at its major hub in Singapore, according to people familiar with its plans. TikTok’s owner, Beijing-based ByteDance Ltd., is also recruiting people in China to work on its TikTok platform. TikTok isn’t available in China, but ByteDance offers a Chinese alternative called Douyin.
TikTok Chief Executive Shou Zi Chew said this week that amid big downsizing at some of his competitors, TikTok was still hiring, though at a measured pace.
“We have always been more cautious in terms of recruitment,” Mr. Chew said at a Bloomberg-sponsored economic forum in Singapore. “We’re still hiring, although at the pace that we think has to correspond with the global challenges that we’re facing.”
Tech Layoffs
While closely held ByteDance is based in Beijing, TikTok has no official headquarters. It has major offices in Los Angeles, New York, Dublin, London and Singapore, where Mr. Chew is based. ByteDance employs about 130,000 workers worldwide. TikTok employs more than 20,000, with about a quarter of that number in the U.S.
TikTok plans to increase the size of its biggest American engineering hub, in Mountain View, Calif., which already has more than 1,000 engineers, according to people familiar with the hiring. In some cases, TikTok recruiters have approached people recently laid off from rivals including
Meta Platforms Inc.
and Twitter Inc. The hiring plans and outreach was reported earlier by the Information.
TikTok hasn’t been immune to the economic headwinds buffeting its rivals. It lowered its target for this year’s advertising revenue to $10 billion from at least $12 billion, Mr. Chew told staff in a recent online meeting.
In 2020, TikTok said it would hire 10,000 U.S. workers; company offices in Los Angeles.
Photo:
Jessica Pons for The Wall Street Journal
The company now aims to hire at a milder pace compared with previous years, people familiar with the plans said. As with any company, TikTok’s plans could change again depending on economic conditions and business performance.
TikTok, which is roughly only five years old, is on a different growth trajectory than many of the older American tech giants that are now shedding thousands of jobs. By some measures, TikTok has surpassed Facebook and Meta-owned Instagram in popularity, especially among American teens. But TikTok still brings in a fraction of the revenue of Meta, which had $118 billion in sales in 2021.
Some more established Silicon Valley rivals have embarked on the biggest job cuts the industry has endured in years. Facebook-owner Meta is laying off about 11,000 employees, while
Amazon.com Inc.
could cut up to 10,000. Twitter,
Lyft Inc.
and other companies have also announced layoffs. Those cuts don’t preclude other hiring for key roles at TikTok rivals.
In 2020, TikTok said it would hire 10,000 U.S. workers, a move that came as it faced growing scrutiny in Washington over its Chinese roots and its access to information about the millions of Americans that use the app.
For now, the company is still recruiting engineers both to improve features that users see on the app, and to improve the algorithm and other behind-the-scenes infrastructure that make TikTok work, according to people familiar with its hiring plans.
The company also plans to add employees to its commercialization team, which figures out how to make money from the app, and its nascent e-commerce team, some of these people said. TikTok also plans to add contractors who would monitor the app for inappropriate videos, in both the U.S. and at a content-moderation hub in Dublin, Ireland, they said.
TikTok’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance, is continuing to recruit people in China, too, according to people familiar with those plans. Some of the new hires would work on TikTok, while others would help ByteDance develop chips.
ByteDance has also been shifting some roles from China to Singapore, in part to address Washington’s concerns about TikTok’s ties to China, according to some of these people. The pace has been slower than expected, they said, because Singapore has a smaller talent pool than China and because of complications in acquiring work visas.
ByteDance in August shared a financial report with employees that indicated that after years of large losses, it turned an operating profit in 2022’s first quarter, The Wall Street Journal recently reported.
Yang Jie contributed to this article.
Write to Raffaele Huang at [email protected] and Stu Woo at [email protected]
Copyright ©2022 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8
Denial of responsibility! Techno Blender is an automatic aggregator of the all world’s media. In each content, the hyperlink to the primary source is specified. All trademarks belong to their rightful owners, all materials to their authors. If you are the owner of the content and do not want us to publish your materials, please contact us by email – [email protected]. The content will be deleted within 24 hours.