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When Elon Musk bought Twitter and cut half its workforce earlier this month, TikTok’s in-house recruiters approached some of the laid-off software engineers about joining the viral video app’s Silicon Valley office. Then last week, the same recruiters contacted some of the engineers cut by Meta Platforms.
The outreach highlighted a contrast between TikTok and the biggest social media companies with headquarters in the San Francisco Bay Area. TikTok, owned by China’s ByteDance, aims to nearly double its staff in Mountain View, Calif., to about 2,000, according to two people familiar with its hiring targets. Some of the hiring is out of necessity: TikTok pledged to hire more U.S.-based engineers after the app came under scrutiny from U.S. government officials in recent years.