TikTok poaches Facebook employees with high salaries to expand overseas?

TikTok, the overseas version of Douyin, has opened an office in Silicon Valley and started poaching Facebook employees, offering salaries up to 20% higher than Facebook, according to multiple people familiar with the matter.

TikTok

TikTok recently moved into an office space in Mountain View, California, which was previously used by Facebook's messaging app WhatsApp, according to multiple people familiar with the matter. TikTok's new office is just a few miles from Facebook's Menlo Park headquarters, escalating the competition between the two companies from attracting young users to a battle for talent.

TikTok was released by ByteDance in 2017 and is known as the overseas version of Douyin. It allows users to watch and create short videos, usually singing. ByteDance says its products have more than 700 million daily active users worldwide. In comparison, Facebook claims that 2.1 billion people use its family of apps every day, including Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp.

Information on the professional social networking site LinkedIn shows that while opening new offices in Silicon Valley, TikTok and ByteDance have also posted multiple job recruitment notices in the San Francisco Bay Area. Since 2018, TikTok and ByteDance have poached more than 24 employees from Facebook.

Salary is 20% higher

Two former Facebook employees who have jumped to TikTok said the attraction of jumping to TikTok is that they are eager to work for a popular social media company as TikTok is experiencing a period of rapid growth. Although Facebook offers unmatched benefits, such as free food all day, TikTok's salary is comparable to Facebook and is equally competitive. A person familiar with the matter said that TikTok's salary is up to 20% higher than Facebook, which is well known in the industry.

People familiar with the matter said that TikTok is interested in poaching experienced employees from its rivals who are capable of solving problems that come with high-growth technology. While poaching people from Facebook, TikTok has poached more employees from other technology companies, including YouTube owned by Google, Amazon, Snap and Hulu.

In addition to opening a new Bay Area office, TikTok also plans to upgrade its headquarters in Culver City, California, near Los Angeles. TikTok will move to new offices there in early 2020 that will be able to accommodate 1,000 employees.

Facebook has not yet listed TikTok as a competitor in its financial documents like Twitter and Snap, but it has been vigilant. Last year, Facebook released a short video app Lasso. Except for the download statistics, Lasso is almost identical to TikTok. A report released by mobile app analysis company Sensor Tower shows that 546 million global users have downloaded the TikTok app from Apple App Store and Google Play Store since 2019. In contrast, only 420,000 global users have downloaded Lasso. These data do not include downloads on the Android platform in China.

Facebook's photo-sharing app Instagram is also reportedly developing a feature called "Clips" that copies TikTok's video-making feature. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently said in a meeting with employees that the company plans to launch Lasso in markets where TikTok has not yet become popular, such as Mexico.

"TikTok is really the first globally popular consumer internet product developed by a Chinese tech giant. It's starting to become popular in the United States, especially among young people," Zuckerberg said.

Facebook did not immediately respond to requests for comment.