By Spencer E. Ante, Business Week
So much for cutting back during the downturn.
As Facebook ramps up hiring from about 1,000 employees today to as many as 1,200 by the end of the year, the social networking giant is recruiting technical and business leaders from some of the best known firms in Silicon Valley to help accelerate its financial performance.
Among the new hires at Facebook are Arturo Bejar, who will soon join as a director of engineering from Yahoo! (YHOO), and David Recordon, an open-source software expert from blogging software maker Six Apart, BusinessWeek.com has learned.
Bejar led Yahoo’s security team, and Recordon was one of the developers of the OpenID authentication software, according to Facebook. Other new hires include former Genentech Chief Financial Officer David Ebersman, now doing the same job at Facebook, and Greg Badros, a senior engineer from Google (GOOG) and now an engineering director at Facebook.
The new technical and managerial talent is part of a 40%-to-50% expansion of Facebook staff that was reported by Bloomberg News on Aug. 24. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told Bloomberg that the recession presents an opportunity for the Web’s largest social network—and one of techdom’s hottest young companies—to scoop up talented engineers and managers. “No one else has been hiring,” Zuckerberg told Bloomberg. “It’s been a great environment for us because the economy has helped out.”