Recruiting the Draft Picks: Twitter's Internal Shuffle, Spurred by a Year-Long Talent Raid on the Valley
Twitter is looking more and more different by the day — and it's not just the company's fancy new little blue bird logo. — The company is in the midst of a significant ongoing …
Context & Ripple Effects
This story is the mirror image of the one CNNMoney told in December 2011 about what was really behind Twitter's staff exodus: a company that had been bleeding people is now described as running a year-long raid on Silicon Valley engineers and executives to fill the gaps, alongside a reorganization of its internal structure and the debut of a new little blue bird logo. The breadth of same-day pickup — Business Insider, Reuters, TechCrunch and PandoDaily all carried it — says the shuffle read as more than routine reorg news.
The hiring push also has a longer lineage at Twitter: back in March 2009 it was already publicly ramping search and platform API hiring (Follow The Hires), so the 2012 raid extends a pattern of using recruiting, rather than product announcements alone, to signal where the company is headed.
First-order effects
- The companies Twitter has been raiding lose senior engineering and product talent mid-cycle, while Twitter's own teams are rebuilt around new leadership structures under the reorg.
Second-order effects
- Rivals in the Valley respond by raising counteroffers and tightening retention packages for their own staff, pushing up the price of experienced consumer-internet talent across the market.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, top consumer web companies compete for scarce builders through open recruiting wars rather than acquisitions, making individual hires — not just deals — a competitive front.
The trend: Consumer internet companies are treating talent acquisition as a primary competitive strategy, with recruiting raids and reorganizations standing in for M&A.