BEIJING, July 22  (TMTPOST)— TikTok’s parent ByteDance may have to embrace further slim-down as evidence showed its management has changed their traditional labor-intensity way to expand business.

Source: Visual China

ByteDance will upgrade its recruitment plan and significantly reduce its hiring from 2022 to 2023, with the aim to slow down the expansion of its organization and improve the efficiency, insiders cited the OKR (Objectives and Key Results) recently updated by CEO Liang Rubo, according to Jiemian. Insiders told the Chinese digital media outlet that Liang’s ORK didn’t specify the extent ByteDance wants to slash, but the company had underscored the slim-down efforts internally.

ByteDance didn’t comment on the report, which could be a major shift for the Chinese internet giant. The leadership believes in outstanding performance coming from great efforts, so they usually input large amounts of money and substantial human resources to pursue their expected results when they develop any new business, Jiemian’ sources noted.  

For the instance of Feishu, a major unit working for collaborative apps with features such as online documentation, instant messaging, audio and video conferencing. The team has a total of nearly 8,000 members, while its competitors like Alibaba’s DingTalk and Tencent’s WeCom normally each have just more than one thousand staff working for.

It is notable that ByteDance has rapidly boosted workforce since 2020 as the headcount increased from 60,000 to 100,000 people in one year alone. The company offered more than 6,000 job openings for new graduates in 2020, and totally recruited more than 12,000 graduates through on-campus job fair in the whole year.

Reports last month said ByteDance ’s education business had less than 5,000 employees after a new round of layoffs including cutting 80% workforce, down from more than 20,000 workers prior to the “double reduction” policy. Chinese media estimated that ByteDance has input more than RMB10 billion in online tutoring in the past three year as it developed and acquired a number of projects from 2018 to 2020.  The job cuts were deemed as the company’s active efforts to spin off businesses with less profitability to pave the way for its Hong Kong listing.