TikTok is hiring 10,000 people in the US for the next three years amidst issues it is facing. Its biggest offices in the country are in New York and California.
With over 1,400 employees in the US, Tiktok has recruited dozens of staff from Facebook and Google, including high-profile executives. Worldwide, TikTok has 172 ex-Googlers and 165 ex-Facebookers, based on an analysis on LinkedIn.
Dissecting the US numbers, TikTok currently has 79 employees who used to work at Google and 79 who were previously with Facebook. Some of them resigned from Google and Facebook years ago but most of them have recently left the Silicon Valley companies to join TikTok.
Blake Chandlee, who was Facebook’s vice president of global partnerships, is now the VP of global business solutions at TikTok based in New York. He resigned in January after over 12 years working for Facebook.
Meanwhile, Chen-Lin Lee quit Facebook last year after nine years. Based in Mountain View, he is now the director of partnerships at TikTok. Prior to Facebook, he worked at Google.
Moreover, TikTok is hiring recruiting officers from US tech giants for its expansion. Kim Louie, a former recruiting manager at Facebook, has been assigned as TikTok’s head of talent acquisitions in New York. Louie worked as a technical sourcer at Google before she became a part of Facebook.
Raymond Chen was a technical recruiter role at Google’s New York office before becoming a part of TikTok's talent acquisition team.
Matthew Brennan, a China-based social media analyst, said that aggressive hiring practices and poaching of staff from competitors is considered the norm in the Chinese tech industry.
“Yet, even within that environment, ByteDance is notorious for its persistence and assertiveness,” he said. “In the company’s early years, the key technical talents were all poached from Baidu, the Chinese search equivalent of Google. The company is well known to offer generous above-market compensation to lure away those it wants.”
Headquarters
While TikTok is hiring in the US, the company is reportedly planning to move its headquarters to UK.
A source familiar with TikTok and wanted to remain anonymous due to the sensitive nature of the issue said that the Chinese-owned social media app has yet to decide where to build its international headquarters. According to TikTok, ByteDance was considering some factors that are not related to the political retaliation against Huawei.
“The U.K. is one of our most important markets globally, with a talented and diverse team in London, including senior leadership,” said a ByteDance representative.
“U.K. employees have quadrupled over the last year and we expect continued strong growth. We remain fully committed to investing in London.”
Western countries expressed concern that Beijing would use Chinese technology firms for espionage. Because of this, companies like Huawei are being investigated more than ever.
The UK had a major issue with Huawei, saying that the company’s telecoms equipment could not be used in the nation’s 5G mobile networks. Huawei has appealed to the UK to reconsider its decision, which came at a time that President Donald Trump was attacking certain Chinese companies.
