25 August 2009 | Author: J. Cave SEO Consultant

Facebook to Increase Staff by 50 per cent

In a Bloomberg article published on Monday, Mark Zuckenberg - Facebook's Chief Executive - announced that the company would expand its staff by up to fifty per cent this year.

Although many newspapers are reporting a Facebook hiring spree, Mark Zuckenberg is quick to suggest otherwise. The recession is far from over in Silicon Valley and with slow growth in Facebook advertising sales, Facebook needs to take things slowly in order to finally achieve profitability.

Regardless of whether Facebook's hiring strategy is rapid or steady, a 50 per cent increase in staff is fantastic news in Silicon Valley, by anyone's standards.

One of the first staff acquisitions Facebook has made is David Recordon, former director of Corporate Development at Six Apart. After two years with the company, David is leaving Six Apart to join Facebook's social engineering team as Senior Opens Manager.

Besides his experience with Six Apart, David will also be bringing experience from his time spent working with Brad Fitzpatrick in developing the OpenID social media technology. David's role within Facebook will be to further develop the open source side of Facebook.

So far this year, Facebook has hired around 200 new employees, according to Mr Yu, a spokesman for the social networking company.

While Facebook may be going against the grain with its plans for hiring, the same cannot be said for rival Myspace. In June of this year, Myspace let 400 workers go in the US followed by nearly two thirds of its workforce worldwide. Myspace's redundancies had meant the two companies had similar staff numbers but with the announcement from Zuckenberg, it looks like Facebook is going to become a considerably larger employer.

Engineers who take up employment with Facebook can look forward to perks such as three free meals a day, but more importantly a paycheck at the end of the month, something that naturally has caused significant interest in Facebook's announcement throughout Silicon Valley.

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