Along With Acquisitions In The U.S., Yahoo Is Also Beefing Up In EMEA With 200 Hires This Year

Yahoo has been moving swiftly to bring talent back into the company — with a number of acquisitions (one only yesterday) and etudes made to ex-employees to return to the purple fold. It’s also, it appears, staffing up internationally as well. Today the company announced that it would be hiring 200 more people over the next 12 months for jobs covering the EMEA region, specifically based out of Dublin and in areas like customer support, technology, operations, HR and finance.

Expanding staff in the region is a sign of how the company intends its recovery strategy to go beyond what it is doing in the U.S. and to attempt to hold on to market position that it has globally. It has a long way to go in this part of the world, though. In UK search engine rankings from the end of last year, Yahoo was a distant third (along with equally distant number-two Bing), behind Google, which is pushing 90% market share.

In an interview with TechCrunch, Christophe Parcot, Yahoo’s MD for EMEA, would not comment on whether Yahoo planned to make any acquisitions in EMEA to bring in talent in the same way that it has done in the U.S.,  nor would he say how many people currently work out of EMEA or Dublin specifically. Yahoo overall has 11,500 staff at the moment. He also says that EMEA is a central part of Yahoo’s wider recovery strategy.

“One of the goals of Marissa and the rest of the leadership is to grow internationally,” he says. “Within EMEA as a region we have a strong presence, for example in the Middle East, UK, France, Germany, Italy and Spain. It’s clearly a part of the world where we will continue investing.”

Parcot has been with Yahoo for a few years and he has the transformation towards optimism under new management has been very apparent on this side of the pond, too. “There is a willingness to grow and learn, and these hires show that Ireland is going to be even more than has been in the past one of our key operations hubs.”

The moves come after a period where Europe was not immune to some of the larger staff reductions at Yahoo. When the company laid off 2,000 employees under then-CEO Scott Thompson — one of the bigger and deeper rounds of cuts at the company prior to the arrival of Marissa Mayer to replace Thompson — Europe faced hundreds of cuts as a result. Ironically, Rich Riley, who had been the head of EMEA at the time, then left Yahoo himself following Thompson’s exit.

In addition to more localized operations in cities like London, where Yahoo has a team of people working in advertising sales, Yahoo has had an operations center in Dublin for 10 years, and it shares the city as a regional HQ with the likes of Google and Facebook.