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 The Wall Street Journal, as several of the world’s biggest tech companies are laying off employees, TikTok is in the middle of a three-year hiring push.
“We have always been more cautious in terms of recruitment.” “We’re still hiring, although at the pace that we think has to correspond with the global challenges that we’re facing,” TikTok Chief Executive Shou Zi Chew was quoted as saying.
In recent weeks, Meta said it was cutting 11,000 jobs across the company, Twitter cut about half its staff under new owner Elon Musk, and Amazon confirmed that it had begun wide-ranging layoffs. Current and former leaders of these companies have said they expanded too fast, particularly during the pandemic as consumers shifted their lives online. Now, these same tech companies are facing whiplash in demand and cutting thousands of positions as broader economic conditions crumble and recession fears mount.
TikTok’s career portal website currently lists more than 4,000 global positions, though it is not clear how often the hiring site is updated. In October, as some of the initial reports of hiring freezes and other cost-cutting measures began to emerge from Silicon Valley, TikTok made headlines for listing several new e-commerce-related roles that seemed to indicate it was looking to create a logistics and warehousing network in the United States.
“We are still hiring,” Chew said at the conference last week, “although, you know, at a pace that we think corresponds with the global challenges that we’re facing.”
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 figuring out 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.