14 DAY TRIAL // The recession is still hurting most businesses but Facebook seems to be blissfully unaware of the troubles most of the others are having. It can afford to be so, with a solid cash infusion earlier this summer and with the expected growth in revenue, but it may still be overreaching a little. Having just announced plans to continue its growth in employee numbers, Facebook has recently made some high-profile hires, getting some top talent from the likes of Yahoo and Google.
Mark Zuckerberg, the social network's founder and CEO, said that the company wanted to grow its staff as much as 40 to 50 percent by the end of the year and it had already started “ramping up” the process with a number of high-profile hires. Business Week has listed a number of great additions to the team, with Facebook snatching Yahoo's security chief, Arturo Bejar, set to become a director of engineering. Other hires include David Recordon, an open-source software expert involved in the OpenID project and who is now working at blogging platform Six Apart, and Greg Badros, a Google senior engineer coming in as an engineering director at the social network.
With no one else hiring, Zuckerberg thinks this is the best time to secure top talent, which should help the company grow even further towards some very high goals. Facebook currently employs around 1,000, having already hired around 200 this year. It also doubled its employee numbers in 2008, going from 400 to 800 people.
However, later comments from the social network were meant to clarify that growing 50 percent was actually a conservative move, with many other companies, like Google, doubling their staff for many years in a row. Facebook made an effort not to get too enthusiastic about its growth and hire beyond its needs and capabilities.