TikTok will keep on hiring even as other social media giants such as Twitter and Meta are retrenching staff due to economic hardships.
Officials at the company have confirmed to multiple news outlets that the “app remains committed to its goal of hiring nearly 1,000 engineers at its Mountain View office”.
“This specific hiring target is related to the company’s goal of ensuring US user data is overseen by a team based in the United States amid scrutiny in Washington due to its parent company ByteDance’s ties to China,” Catherine Thorbecke writes.
Also Read: TikTok has Failed to Curb Misinformation, Report Reveals
Speaking at the Bloomberg New Economy Forum in Singapore, last week, TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew confirmed that the company was “still recruiting in response to the topic of layoffs at other tech companies, including Facebook-parent Meta and Amazon.”
“We have always been more cautious in terms of recruitment…At this stage of our growth, I think that our pace, our cadence, of hiring is just right for us,” he said.
Meta has announced that it is cutting 11,000 jobs across the company while Twitter has already cut about half of its staff. Similarly, Amazon confirmed that “it had begun wide-ranging layoffs.”
The shift in the hiring landscape in Silicon Valley, Catherine argues, “could help TikTok as it looks to appease critics and cement its position in the United States, and also as it works to expand into new product categories.”