TikTok Is Recruiting Laid-Off Meta Employees
Meta announced 11,000 job cuts on November 9, representing about 13% of its workforce. Many affected individuals have since taken to TikTok to share their experiences and feelings of being laid off, and the ByteDance-owned short video platform has even begun to recruit a large number of them.
It can be seen from a job information sharing form that TikTok’s open positions include data engineers, e-commerce workers, data privacy management, machine learning, AR and so on. On Blind, a career advice and social platform, there are also many posts showing that TikTok is recruiting employees who have been laid off from Meta. If interviewers see employees from Meta, the chances of them passing the interview will be extremely high.
Many US technology companies are laying off employees, including Stripe, Twitter, Microsoft and others, while TikTok is recruiting heavily. TikTok’s popularity in the US is increasing. According to the latest data from Sensor Tower, the app ranked first in terms of total revenue from the iOS and Android app stores in the United States in the second quarter of this year, while YouTube and Tinder ranked second and third respectively. In October, TikTok and its sister app in China obtained more than $326 million from the App Store and Google Play – 1.55 times that of the same period last year.
At the same time, TikTok’s download volume exceeded 175 million times within a year, and it has exceeded 10 million for nine consecutive quarters, continuing to beat Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp.
In the American market, TikTok’s download volume in the App Store has occupied the top spot for a long time since the first quarter of 2021. This year, TikTok has been ranked first in the Google Play download list for three consecutive quarters, and the installation volume in the first quarter has increased by 19% year-on-year.
TikTok has plundered a large number of users and advertisers from Meta. According to the latest statistics from Reuters, as of the second quarter of this year, 37% of TikTok and Facebook users overlapped, while in the same period last year, less than 10% of people used Facebook and TikTok at the same time.
SEE ALSO: Insiders Deny ByteDance’s TikTok Has Reached 1B Worldwide Daily Active Users
LatePost reported in January that TikTok accelerated its commercialization process in the past year. In early 2021, the number of ad and technical teams of TikTok in Austin and Mountain View doubled. At present, TikTok has nearly 20,000 employees, compared with less than 4,000 at the beginning of 2020.
LatePost commented that, compared with Meta and other products, TikTok still has many shortcomings in its ad business. For example, Meta’s product form determines that it can master more advanced user tags, including real names and social relationships, which helps it to make more accurate ad recommendations. In addition, Meta has more major customers, while TikTok’s current advertisers are mainly small and medium-sized internet companies. This is why TikTok began to vigorously develop e-commerce in the past year, launching TikTok Shop for the US on November 10.
Richard Xu, US Representative of Grand View Capital, a VC fund focused on investing in Chinese entrepreneurs who do business outside of China, commented, “This is an opportunity for Chinese companies to explore overseas markets. They have been in great need of such talents. On the one hand, these talents have a good understanding of the culture in China and the US. On the other hand, these enterprises can reduce their dependence on Chinese technical teams. In addition to ByteDance, many Chinese companies are taking advantage of Meta’s layoffs for team expansion.”
