Yahoo has picked up a bunch of new talent through the 20+ acqui-hires it has made since Marissa Mayer took over as CEO in 2012, but Yahoo’s push to grow the company, apparently is also starting to wear off on the general population, too. Today Marissa Mayer revealed that it now gets 12,000 resumes each week, equivalent to how many employees the company has today. That’s a rise of five to six times compared to what the company was receiving before she took over, she said today at TC Disrupt.
She also said that the company’s active campaign to bring ex-Yahoo’s back into the fold — kicked off in earnest in January 2013 — is also bearing fruit. Some 14% of new hires are “boomerangs,” she noted.
Some of this is in very specific and strategic areas, like mobile, whose staffing has grown by a factor of 10.
The company as led by Mayer is looking for longer-term rather than short-term gains. She sees growth as a three-year process, and part of that is about staffing. Having the right people on board will lead to good products, a “chain reaction,” she says. Attrition of users leaving is down by a factor of three to four, she said.
“I have said it would take multiple years…for the growth to be the way we wanted it to be. Having the right people and products and getting to the right traffic. People, products, traffic and revenue,” she said.
By talking about the need for a critical mass of employees needed to effect change, Mayer is tapping into a wider trend. Zappos founder Tony Hseih is currently trying to bring in a mass of entrepreneurs to run-down Downtown Las Vegas under the same premise: the idea is that if you can have 100 residents per acre, this creates a productive amount of “collisionable” hours where users can run into each other and collaborate/inspire each other.
All the same, she touted the company as trying to remain fleet of foot. “We are the world’s largest startup,” she said today. “We pride ourselves on being scrappy.”
Here’s the full interview: