Looking for Work? Facebook Wants Salesmen, Google Wants Product People.
Neither Facebook or Google are in the habit of laying out their corporate road maps for outsiders. But you can get a decent sense of what they’re planning by looking at their job postings, which they helpfully post on LinkedIn.
Capstone Investments has sorted through the last few months of postings and points out an interesting difference between the two companies: Google is hiring more product people than sales people, and Facebook is doing the opposite.
Here’s Google’s hiring breakdown for the last six months:
And here’s Facebook’s:
Note that these charts don’t account for all of the two companies’ hiring — just the LinkedIn postings that Capstone has been able to track down. Google increased its employee count by 1,114 people in the last quarter of 2011, which means there’s a minimum — and likely many more — of 422 hires unaccounted for.
For context, note the huge disparity in the company’s payrolls. Google employed 32,467 people at the end of 2011, while Facebook had 10 percent of that — just 3,200 people.
Special note for professional YouTube-watchers: Capstone breaks out the hires for Google’s “emerging businesses” and finds that most of them are reserved for YouTube and Android. It also notes that a good chunk of the YouTube postings are for Asia hires, and also notes postings for “YouTube Commerce” based in Asia and the company’s San Bruno, Calif., HQ.
“The positions are aimed at growing an on-demand/paid content business, including live streaming, on YouTube — a new business line for the site,” Capstone notes. Which makes sense, because when I talked to YouTube boss Salar Kamangar at D: Dive Into Media in January, he acknowledged that the company was interested in pursuing subscription businesses. See? Sometimes you can simply ask these guys what they’re up to.
Update: When Twitter works, it’s great. Here’s some additional context via Digiday’s super-smart ad guy Brian Morrissey:
@pkafka google is a far more mature sales org. fb is way understaffed, at least according to agencies.
— Brian Morrissey (@bmorrissey) March 27, 2012
@pkafka fb is v hands off w brands. wants to be a landlord, not a hand-holder. it has MBA types more than regular sales people.
— Brian Morrissey (@bmorrissey) March 27, 2012
(Image courtesy of Shutterstock/Everett Collection)
