ByteDance launched its 2022 campus recruitment drive last week, opening more than 8,000 jobs for college students. This is the most extensive hiring drive by the company since its founding in 2012. At present, ByteDance’s headcount exceeds 110,000.
It is worth noting that ByteDance filled 7,000 vacancies during its spring campus recruitment in March. The company has been scaling up on all fronts at a staggering pace. It hired 6,000 people in each of spring and fall in 2020. In 2019, ByteDance recruited 5,000 new staff. For these jobs, all new hires were fresh graduates.
The current recruitment drive is for students who will complete their studies between September 2021 and August 2022. The open positions span R&D, product development, business operations, sales, design, marketing, technical support, and game development in more than 20 cities in China. Specifically, more than half of the roles are in R&D, while jobs for product development doubled compared to 2020.
The scale of ByteDance’s recruitment dwarfs similar efforts by companies like Alibaba, Meituan, JD.com, and Baidu. ByteDance now has a larger staff size than Tencent.
But this rapid expansion of personnel has also raised questions about where the company is heading. Earlier this month, ByteDance’s edtech arm, Dali Education, laid off thousands of employees after the central government announced its harshest curbs yet on the after-school tutoring industry.
In recent years, ByteDance has been continuously cultivating new lines of business beyond ads that are published on its hit apps like Douyin and Toutiao. It has also been an active investor in smaller companies. By the end of 2020, ByteDance had cut checks for 32 companies that operate in a variety of sectors, including video games, e-commerce, entertainment, and consumer brands.
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