Why does TikTok increase its recruitment in London?

Europe has many well-known cities as the global technology hub, but London is the only place TikTok has increased the recruitment of additional personnel to develop new features for its applications.

'They are in the process of hiring a large hiring,' says a technology worker in London who is approached by a TikTok recruiter.

According to analysis on the social networking service site LinkedIn, the salary offered by TikTok has attracted many employees to leave big tech companies like Google and Facebook. TikTok declined to comment for CNBC's request.

TikTok is an international version of the Douyin application developed by Chinese internet technology company ByteDance. In 2017, ByteDance bought rival US app Musical.ly for about $ 1 billion, then merged it with TikTok. Before the explosion of app users, TikTok set up offices with different scales in 41 countries. In Europe, TikTok has offices in Paris, Berlin and Dublin.

Although TikTok did not disclose the number of employees, according to data from LindkeIn, the company has about 2,948 employees worldwide. The company is now recruiting more people for 824 jobs, of which 117 are in London, more than anywhere else in the world. More specifically, TikTok is looking for a main machine engineer to perform surveillance work, iOS engineer, software engineer, solution engineer. In addition, product management positions in London to oversee the whole of Europe are also being recruited.

TikTok is willing to pay a major machine learning engineer a base salary of £ 200,000 annually (about $ 246,000), an anonymous tech worker who has been approached by TikTok for this role revealed. This person said the main machine engineer is responsible for managing a group of about 10 employees.

Not only paying high salaries, TikTok is also ready to recruit talent from US technology giants such as Google, Facebook, Amazon and Twitter. Late last year, Theo Bertram left his senior management position at Google to join TikTok as director of European government and public relations. In March, Ross Baron also retired from his job as a recruiting leader at Facebook to take up a similar position in Western Europe for TikTok. In addition, there are many other examples of people who have left US technology companies to join TikTok in London.

TikTok's decision to choose London as its main hub in Europe is seen as a vote of confidence for the UK's capital, which is also an indication that Brexit (Britain left the EU) has not affected. too big for international tech companies to plan. 'The government has an agenda that fully supports innovation and growth in the UK tech ecosystem. London is a special place to serve fast-growing companies like TikTok ', Russ Shaw, founder of Tech London Advocates, told CNBC.

Since becoming popular, TikTok has struggled with many controversial issues. In November, the US government issued a national security assessment of ByteDance's acquisition of Musical.ly. Washington is concerned that the Chinese technology company may be censoring sensitive content and worried about how it stores user data.

In February 2020, the US Transportation Security Administration (TSA) banned employees from using TikTok to create social media posts for the agency. The U.S. Navy, US Infantry, and Australian Defense Department also asked to stop installing the app on government-owned mobile devices, as well as encourage soldiers not to install it on their phones.

In March 2020, TikTok announced it would open the 'Transparency Center' in Los Angeles, giving more access to the company's content censorship practices in the United States.