Facebook to take on 50% extra staff

Facebook plans to increase its staff by 50% this year, according to CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

He told Bloomberg that a surplus of engineers due to the recession has presented the social network with an good opportunity, suggesting the areas of growth for the company would be on the engineering side and not commercial.

“No one else has been hiring. It has been a great environment for us because the economy has helped out,” said Zuckerberg.

Facebook currently has 1,000 employees, approximately 50 in the UK.

Earlier this month it bought social news feed aggregator FriendFeed for £30m, in a bid to improve its real-time search capabilities (nma.co.uk 11 August 2009).

Competing social network MySpace cut staff by 30% in the US and by over 60% in the UK in July (nma.co.uk 2 July 2009).

This story first appeared on newmediaage.co.uk

 

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