Restoring ByteDance's HR System: The Rise and Fall of China's Internet's Most Extreme Talent Factory

The entrepreneurial era is over.

Wen 丨 Gao Honghao

Editor丨Huang Junjie

Before ByteDance, no Chinese Internet company seemed to have demonstrated its huge need for people so clearly.

In its 12 years of existence, China's most dynamic and ambitious Internet company has been attracting China's best young people at an astonishing rate.

From 0 to 100,000 people, Ali took 19 years and Tencent 23 years. ByteDance only took 8 years.

In order to support such rapid growth, ByteDance, known as the "App Factory", has established an HR and organizational system similar to the "Talent Factory" internally. At its peak, ByteDance's HR department had more than 5,000 employees.

After a company reaches tens of thousands of people, HR often shifts more time to organizational management. But for a long time, ByteDance's HR focused on one job: hiring desperately. Every year, more than 80% of young people who graduate from dozens of Chinese universities with computer-related majors are connected to the system at least once.

This system was born at a unique point in time——— 2016. At that time, Toutiao was climbing to become the largest information platform in China, and Douyin and TikTok had just established projects; ByteDance needed to run wildly, and this efficient system came at an opportune time, supporting the ByteDance team to scale 100-fold over the next five years and helping keep the company as entrepreneurial as long as possible.

With Douyin's explosive growth, TikTok stirred the nerves of the global Internet overlord, and ByteDance's HR continued to sweep the recruitment market, trying to snatch out the best talent in the market with salaries generally higher than the average for the same position. Even in 2022, when most Internet companies slow down and turn to cost reduction and efficiency increase, ByteDance still provides a lot of opportunities for headhunters and is the first choice for most graduates who aspire to big factories.

This system gathers the shadows of various excellent companies, and is not exactly a copy of another company: it is extremely determined to implement the OKR system from Google, unifying goals and assessments from top to bottom; It learns from Netflix's adult culture, emphasizing that employees are trusted but also responsible; It is also very similar to the Alibaba and Amazon of the past, willing to invest a lot of manpower to try without predecessors.

Few companies are as vague as the promotion and incentive criteria, talent, and organizational development systems, even with 100,000 employees. It's just that when the entrepreneurial era ends and the size of the company no longer expands, or even begins to decrease, these vague effects begin to manifest.

At the end of 2022, the business leaders of Douyin e-commerce were told that the teams would no longer expand massively in the new year, and the basic principle was "go one person and enter another." A person familiar with the matter said. If the newly launched Douyin e-commerce — a Taobao-like mall in Douyin — doesn't improve significantly, layoffs may be inevitable. E-commerce is seen as the biggest driver of ByteDance's revenue.

During the same period, ByteDance slowed hiring for most of its businesses, and several profitable businesses began to lay off employees. The HR team supporting this system has also been cut by nearly 1,000 people.

The decisive battle is first

In March 2016, Zhang Yiming issued the goal of "decisive battle first" at the annual meeting of ByteDance. Today's headlines were used by 33 million people every day at the time, second only to Tencent News in terms of activity in information products. At a plenary meeting a few months later, Zhang Yiming added, "We are lucky, and when we encounter a challenging matter, we should be radical." ”

The slogan didn't attract much attention at the time, the information aggregation platform was neither sexy nor cool, and the competitors were mostly born in the portal period. Didi was the most watched company in the Internet industry that year, and ride-hailing was the industry with unlimited imagination. The company had just raised more than $3 billion in funding and was engaged in a subsidy war with Silicon Valley star Uber in China that cost tens of billions of yuan a year. Today's headlines last raised money in 2014, with only $100 million.

However, by this time, Zhang's ambitions were clear: he was determined to bring the company to hundreds of billions of dollars. In 2016, the only Chinese Internet companies with a market value of more than $100 billion in the world were Tencent and Alibaba.

At a meeting, Zhang Yiming made an analysis: "At the beginning of 2016, a wave of technology stock markets in the United States fell by nearly half, why did the overall market value still rise by 19%? The reason is that Google and Facebook have gone up. He saw that only the larger the company can form a scale effect, the global Internet advertising market market is almost completely in the hands of Google and Facebook, which siphon the advertising resources of medium-sized companies such as Twitter and LinkedIn to have the current stock price shock.

At the same time, today's headlines started the process of going to sea; Three video products are also being incubated simultaneously, including watermelon videos benchmarked against YouTube, volcano short videos benchmarked against Kuaishou, the largest short video platform in China, and Douyin benchmarked against musical.ly. These are the futures he is firmly optimistic about.

And the biggest problem that hinders his goals is that there are too few people in the company.

At the beginning of 2016, ByteDance had only 1,270 employees, which was far from enough for the development of multiple new video services and overseas businesses. By comparison, Alibaba, Baidu and Tencent all have more than 30,000 employees.

Zhang Yiming's concept of attaching importance to talents has a long history. "He thinks a lot of things are ostensibly strategic issues, but they are essentially talent issues." A person from ByteDance's strategy department said.

Zhang Yiming once used Xunlei as an example. The company had great potential when it entered the search space in 2008, but was left behind because of a lack of manpower, many product issues were not solved in time. Reddit is another example he describes as "unenterprising." This is an American-like forum product, "although the traffic is large, but there are only a few dozen employees for many years." ”

In the early days, Zhang Yiming was the company's first HR. He personally participates in every interview, including recruitment to the company's front desk; There are also patience and months, repeatedly meeting candidates until the other party agrees to join, such as Zhao Tian, then general manager of Sina Mobile's business unit——— Zhang Yiming chatted with her three times in the same café for several months. Until 2015, Zhang Yiming could easily call out new employees in the company's elevator and sometimes take them to Wangxiangyuan restaurant for dinner.

The founder's early efforts limited ByteDance's recruitment efficiency before 2016: there were only about a dozen HRs, which was completely unable to effectively screen fresh graduates. In 2016, ByteDance's Shanghai R&D center only introduced headhunting channels three months after opening, and to HR's surprise, the resumes handed in by headhunters were almost all new to them. "That means we can't even get our resumes off the water." An HR in ByteDance's Shanghai office said.

After the annual meeting, which was full of bold words, Zhang Yiming conducted a round of visits and investigations to various departments of the company, and he was dissatisfied with what he saw. He reminded the HR department that in the early years, ByteDance could recruit people at 9:30 and send an offer at 10:30 after the interview, but now the approval time is getting longer and longer.

"Is it that the bigger the company, the more it neglects talent? Are we still hungry for talent? The CEO, who was considered unemotional, raised his voice in a rare way when he spoke at a meeting after the survey.

All these phenomena are what he considers to be the loss of the "always entrepreneurial" spirit. This is the corporate culture he learned from Amazon, and employees should be self-driven, without boundaries, not afraid of trouble, and resilient. In the past, he had hardly popularized the concept publicly in the company, but "now I will mention it repeatedly." He said.

At the end of the year, Zhang Yiming was again asked by employees at the plenary meeting about his views on the competitive situation, saying: "The company 'has no silver bullets' and needs to be radical. The so-called radical, first of all, is that the scale can not be profitable, or even a large loss. ByteDance's business units immediately set aggressive initial recruitment targets, which, if fully realized, will employ more than 10,000 people in 2017; In 2018, it will reach 20,000 people, close to the size of Baidu and Tencent.

In the years since, ByteDance has followed this aggressive goal, recruiting an average of hundreds of people every weekday. By 2020, the total number of ByteDance, which was only eight years old, had reached 100,000.

Build your own headhunting company and exhaust China's outstanding graduates

Since its second year of establishment, ByteDance has begun to build a middle platform, successively forming a middle platform for growth, algorithms, and engineering. Zhongtai has accumulated a wealth of general capabilities and technologies for each business to use and use, which greatly improves the efficiency of product development and enables ByteDance to continuously release new products in a short period of time.

After the radical recruitment plan was proposed, ByteDance set up a recruitment center in the HR department. When discussing the plan, Zhang Yiming explained: "It is similar to building an internal headhunting company. ”

This is ByteDance's first functional middle office. According to the idea, it wants to build a resume database that can exhaust the country's outstanding talents; Help all businesses to do batch recruitment, such as campus recruitment, external channel construction, and technology, research and development and other important and scarce job recruitment. In the future, it may also have to do product, operation and other positions for various businesses. But getting this machine to turn around is not easy.

Yang Le was the first head of ByteDance's recruitment center, just a few months after joining the company. Prior to that, he worked at Adobe and Ant Financial.

Building a recruitment system from scratch is not easy for Yang Le, a newcomer to the company. In the past, all of ByteDance's hiring tasks were done by HR managers (HRBPs) in business units, who reported directly to Xiao Jinmei, Director of Human Resources (HRD). Xiao Jinmei has followed Zhang Yiming to start a business for many years, not only a founding team member of ByteDance, but also the human resources director of Zhang's previous company, Jiujiufang.

Initially, Yang Le could only focus more on the construction of external channels, such as improving the coverage of Boss direct recruitment and Zhaopin recruitment, which is a matter that can be started faster. However, these traditional practices have not brought significant improvement to recruitment efficiency, and external competition for talents is becoming increasingly fierce.

In August 2016, Didi swallowed the China business of its biggest competitor, Uber, rising to a valuation of $35 billion. At the same time, companies such as SenseTime, Quanshi, and Momenta have taken advantage of the current AI boom to grab people, and they have offered fresh graduates an annual salary package of more than 500,000 yuan, which is higher than the standard of any Internet company.

At that time, Zhang Yiming also tried to deliberately avoid publicity about the company. Until 2016, he was adamant not to release any figures on users, revenue and valuation. The cunning founder firmly believes that doing so will hide his strength and confuse competitors and leave more time window for the company.

The strategy worked competitively, but made it harder to recruit talent. "Few people know that among the companies founded after 2010, ByteDance's products have accounted for the most user time, with revenue reaching 6.2 billion yuan." A senior person close to ByteDance said.

Didi's HR uses this information gap to grab hesitant candidates. "Food, clothing, housing and transportation are the basic needs of human beings, and today's headlines are just an entertainment product that is not just needed, and the prospects are limited." They said to the candidates.

A few months later, Yang Le left ByteDance. Zhang Yiming realized that the conventional old way would not work. In July 2017, ByteDance acquired OfferCome, an executive search firm, and its founder, Wei Xiaokang, joined ByteDance as the second head of the recruitment center. Zhang Yiming has a tradition of acquiring startups and acquiring their talents, including Zhang Nan, head of Douyin BU, and Liu Jiabin, former head of Douyin Image Middle Platform and Editing.

Wei Xiaokang is young and driven, and has rich experience in recruitment, and ByteDance has also acquired a resource pool with a large resume reserve because of the acquisition of OfferCome. After taking office, he quickly made an almost unprecedented move in the Internet industry——— producing a map of fresh graduates.

The team first inventoried all the core majors of the top 20 universities in the country, and then obtained all the contact information of all the graduates, master's and doctoral graduates of these schools and majors through various channels. Front-line HR has received a hard requirement: the reach rate of undergraduate students in key majors in key universities should be more than 80%, and the reach rate of masters should be above 90%. At that time, there were more than 3,000 undergraduates in the computer schools of Tsinghua University, Peking University, Fudan University, Shanghai Jiaotong University, Beijing Post and Huake alone.

ByteDance, which believes in the miracle of great power, has simultaneously opened to build its own talent resume database. The new ByteDance HR and interns were divided into teams of 5-6 people each to manually search and screen resumes and move them into the library on a third-party recruitment platform. On average, they find about 200 resumes a day. To this end, the number of ByteDance HR interns alone reaches thousands. Every time the headhunters recommend a person, they are also added to the talent pool, regardless of whether the candidate ends up joining the job or not.

With the resume library, how to set the salary has become a problem. The HR team called all the fresh graduates of the target colleges and majors and got the students' offers and salaries. Based on the information obtained, they calculated an average salary figure and immediately reported it to management. At that time, the highest bidder in the Internet industry, the highest annual salary package that could be offered to graduates was 250,000.

ByteDance also likes to use A/B Test to guide its behavior when making products. In the case of a general salary of 200,000 in the industry, Wei Xiaokang and Xiao Jinmei only took a few hours to photograph the minimum annual salary standard of 300,000 for fresh graduates in product and technical positions. Soon the figure was reported to Zhang Yiming and Hua Wei, the head of human resources, without any objection.

The situation was quickly reversed. Over the next few months, the cafeteria in the AVIC Building office building of ByteDance turned into a recruitment site, bustling with people every weekend from morning to night. The only requirement set by the team was "fast": complete all interviews the same day, and send out the offer the same day. "At most, there were about 700 applicants in just one day." A first-hand ByteDance HR recalled, "There were not enough interviewers. ”

After the company has tens of thousands of people, HR still only does recruitment all year round

Different companies have different understandings of HR. In Alibaba, employees used to call the HR of various business departments political commissars, most of whom were transformed from the front line of the business to help the business management team, transfer and inherit the company's ideology, strategy and culture; At Tencent, HR is considered to be the guarantor of the orderly operation of the company's processes and the stable growth of employees.

But at ByteDance, HR has focused on one job for a long time: recruitment.

Every time a new resume is released from the internal resume pool, HR sets an alarm clock in advance and scrambles to salvage resumes when the time comes. "A good resume will be snatched away by other departments." An HR from a Douyin BU (business unit) said.

In most companies, all resumes that enter the review and interview process are temporarily marked as locked, and once the candidate fails the interview, the resume will be returned to the company's resume database to be salvaged. But in the early days, ByteDance did not set limits on this, and it was common for ByteDance's HR to look through resumes or privately solicit candidates through recruitment channels such as Pulse, even when they knew they were locked by other departments. This is why some candidates will receive more than ten ByteDance HR calls for a period of time.

ByteDance has little control over the number of people employed. In the stage of rapid business growth, the R&D side put forward the need to recruit 20 Android engineers within one month; Feishu temporarily requested a significant increase in manpower during the Spring Festival one year. "All businesses are waiting to be devoured like hungry wolves with their mouths open and at any cost, and we will be satisfied as long as they mention it." A former ByteDance HR middle executive said.

Business leaders ask HR to write weekly or even daily reports on recruitment and interview progress. Some HR was forced to rush, and reflexively dragged the business employees into the conference room, giving each of them a blank piece of paper and a pen. "Open your WeChat and address book, fill in all the people you think are responsible for the standard and can be pushed inside, and I'll dig it." The above pre-ByteDance HR said. This is his own experience.

In contrast, many Internet companies will become cautious in hiring after the total number of employees exceeds 10,000. One HR source said that Didi earns hard money with low gross margins, and after the number of employees exceeded 10,000 in 2018, the number of recruits in each business unit began to have strict budget limits. Once a business exceeds its budget in hiring, the recruitment of the entire business unit will be stopped until the accounts are cleared before it can reopen. During this period, special recruitment needs must be approved by the President.

After Tencent's total number of employees exceeded 20,000 in 2012, Chairman and CEO Ma Huateng also expressed internal concerns about the dilution of the company's culture and frequent management problems. In 2014, Tencent's president Martin Lau showed employees a chart at the annual meeting, and he put Tencent's per capita profit margin changes over the years. The chart shows that since two years ago, Tencent's per employee profit margin has begun to decline year by year. "The implication is obvious, the company is going to start controlling costs." A Tencent person present told LatePost.

A highly automated administrative, human technology platform frees the vast majority of HR from the tedious day-to-day organizational tasks, giving them more time to complete recruitment tasks.

Before onboarding, each employee receives an email from ByteDance's human resources system People, guiding them step by step through the process on their own. ByteDance also had no onboarding until 2018. On the day of entry, new employees will be pulled into the Feishu group of their departments, and basically receive documents including work content on the same day. What was originally an empty schedule will fill up in a very short time.

People system is a human resources and administrative office system integration platform developed by ByteDance in 2016. At first, it could only find personal information and write OKRs; In 2017, ByteDance added recruitment functions to the People system, including the development of a resume parsing function that is rare in the industry; Beginning in 2018, ByteDance stopped purchasing an external Workday system and switched the leave attendance system to the People system.

The People system has become the only low-level system on the market that integrates almost all office functions, and HR and employees can complete almost all matters related to human resources and administration online.

Alibaba's current recruitment and personnel information management use different underlying systems, due to historical reasons, the two sides of the data are difficult to get through, not only often errors when calling each other, sometimes even need to be manually transmitted through the Excel guide. In Tencent and Meituan, onboarding approval requires manual email forwarding to complete.

Another core function of HR is to address the information gaps that exist in every organization, including top-to-bottom information delivery, identifying organizational issues, and supporting organizational escalation.

At ByteDance, if they encounter problems using various tools developed in-house, they can look for a 24-hour help desk to help solve the problem at any time. A former ByteDance employee said that if a problem occurs, it can usually be solved in minutes — and the employees behind the 24-hour help desk also have a mechanism for assessing how long it takes to deal with the problem.

Zhang Yiming admires the US online video company Netflix's "full context, as little control as possible" management model. He believes that good employees should be distributed processors, and after obtaining sufficient information, they are no longer simple executors, but have more judgment ability, so as to achieve efficient division of labor and collaboration.

As a result, ByteDance's employees can create more than 10 million documents on Feishu (internal collaboration software) a year, which record the content of various business and meetings of the company to facilitate work handover. On the first day of employment, a new employee can quickly start a new job by simply browsing through the relevant articles for half a day.

ByteDance's employees are accustomed to doing everything related to the company on Feishu and rarely add WeChat to each other. When they leave, these relationships are likely to dissipate with the discontinuation of Feishu. A former ByteDance employee laughed at himself, "Come to ByteDance, and when you leave, you will find that you have to leave everything, but you can't take anything with you." ”

Compared with Huawei and Alibaba, which also have more than 100,000 employees, ByteDance's HR has relatively limited power in the company.

"Being able to influence performance and promotion is what you have a say." An Alibaba senior HR said. Alibaba's HR participates in employee performance appraisals and has a veto over employee promotions. But at ByteDance, HR has long focused on hiring, and these powers are decentralized by the 360-degree EIA mechanism——— and employee assessments are done by superiors, subordinates, colleagues, and cooperative departments.

They also have a relatively weak voice in business. HR tried to train business leaders on management, but this sparked resistance from them. "Why should we manage, aren't we all adults?" A ByteDance executive and business leader was the first to raise questions.

Such a system has helped ByteDance assemble a huge talent team in a short period of time. At the end of 2017, Douyin, a short video incubated by ByteDance, gradually improved and stood out internally. Soon, it will also explode into the public in a few months during the Spring Festival, and surpass Kuaishou to become the largest short video platform in China.

The rapid expansion of the business once again stimulated Zhang Yiming's appetite. His face-to-face CEO in December of that year further asked HR to find the best talent in an exhaustible percentage. ”

The "smart people" and "blue collars" of the Internet

Huawei is the key to building ByteDance's HR system. As the head of human resources at ByteDance, he worked with Zhang Yiming to shape the company's organizational management model and corporate culture.

After joining ByteDance in 2014, Huawei was initially responsible for corporate finance. Since then, he has been responsible for strategic investments, leading ByteDance's investments in Kuaikan Comics and Oriental IC. After a while, under the suggestion of Zhang Yiming, he undertook the work of building the company's human resources system.

Zhang Yiming believes that the ability to make investment is very important, and the ability to see people is to see people. As a result, he also became the head of the president's office of ByteDance, Zhang Yiming's think tank, and the most important task is to look at strategy and find executives for him.

Colleagues who have worked with Hua Wei for a long time describe him as extremely intelligent. In 2013, he was involved in the strategic investment business at Phoenix.com. At that time, Phoenix was unsure about investing in a little information or today's headlines, and Hua Wei pushed the latter, "firmly believing that this is a company with a market value of trillions." A former ByteDance mid-level manager said.

He thinks quickly, makes judgments and makes decisions. If you look through Hua Wei's interview records over the years, "the number of words written in 10 interview evaluations is not as many as 1 by others." A ByteDance HR who has crossed paths with Hua Wei said

"Smart person" is the word that Hua Wei most often hangs on his lips. "Hua Wei believes that people cannot be cultivated, so ByteDance does not cultivate people, only recruits smart people." If you recruit it, you can solve 90% of the problems. A head of ByteDance's HR business commented on LatePost. Smart people, "at best, people who have a clear sense of purpose and know how to iterate themselves." ”

For this logic, ByteDance did not design a fixed annual salary adjustment mechanism, promotion mechanism and perfect rank system. For a long time, ByteDance did not pay much attention to organizational development and talent training mechanisms. Employees here joke that their careers are "at the pinnacle."

"One of Hua Wei's frequent mantras is 'I don't care'." The above-mentioned former ByteDance source said that Hua Wei believes that as long as HR has clearly thought about the most core things, other problems can be ignored.

The so-called core things, one is the bi-monthly OKR system; One is the 360 EIA. The former ensures that employees are always in a state of non-stop running; The latter guarantees relative fairness. They effectively ensure the continuous operation of ByteDance, the talent "factory".

ByteDance is the first company in the Internet industry to implement "bi-monthly" performance appraisals. At the beginning of each performance cycle, all employees fill out OKRs that are publicly visible to the majority and set bimonthly goals. During the assessment period after two months, it is clear at a glance whether employees have completed the bi-monthly tasks. Since this will directly affect their performance, they will work hard to achieve their goals in these two months.

In contrast to Tencent, the performance cycle is half a year. Due to the long time, the goals and tasks set by the team at the beginning of the year are often adjusted or even canceled in the middle of the process, which also means that it cannot be used as the most powerful criterion for evaluating the performance of employees. Until the performance period of each six months, Tencent's employees will in turn summarize what they have done in the past six months, and the scoring criteria are more subjectively evaluated by superior leaders.

In January 2021, a discussion about "whether to unify the rank system" caused the group of ByteDance's management to explode.

A ByteDance source who personally experienced the establishment of the system told LatePost that one of the core reasons is that ByteDance is developing too quickly, and many rules are completely inapplicable a year after its establishment. In 2017, ByteDance's grassroots HR was generally 1-2 and 2-1 in the company, often with several years of work experience; Senior HR with ten years of experience is in the 2-2 ranks. Just one year later, the number of ByteDance employees doubled, a large number of school recruits poured into the company, they had 1-2 grades and corresponding salaries as soon as they graduated, "It is obviously unscientific to give another 2-2 to an HR with ten years of experience." He said.

Two schools of view have also formed within the management group. HR supports uniform ranks because ByteDance's headcount and business growth have stabilized, and clear and unified ranks facilitate the management and evaluation of employees. The business side reacted fiercely: after clarifying the rank standards, employees will use this as an excuse to relax their requirements for themselves, instead of thinking about how to break through their own rank standards and do one thing to the extreme; At the same time, they will think every day about how to climb the grid and get promoted. The argument went away.

At ByteDance, "fighting" is the talent training and promotion mechanism that is considered the best. It doesn't matter if there is a fixed promotion channel, business growth is the best promotion channel, such as Zhang Nan, CEO of Douyin Group after the 80s, Han Shangyou, the general head of Douyin after the 90s, and Zhi Ying, the head of TikTok's product and content ecology. The stories of these heroes, regardless of their origins, appeal to every young person, who believes that they have enough strength and opportunity to become the lucky one at the head. So they all have enough motivation and self-drive to join this "meat grinder"——— from 2016 to 2022, the number of people at ByteDance has increased by more than 100 times, adding thousands of middle-level positions.

However, the system is not static. As long as it can achieve its goal, ByteDance is willing to overturn conventional rules, be flexible enough to change its own mechanism, and even the values it has long promoted internally and externally.

It values algorithms and technology as much as Google and Baidu, but the difference is that it is willing to sacrifice its own profit margins and do it with self-employed employees in positions that other companies choose to outsource.

Internet platforms that pursue profit margins are less likely to expand small and medium-sized advertisers with their own employees, and they outsource such labor-intensive tasks to reduce recruitment and personnel management costs. However, since 2016, ByteDance has gradually built a commercial sales team of nearly 20,000 people internally.

The potential advantage of building a self-built team is that it can be as flexible as hands and feet to compete with Baidu, which has a complete agency system. But the move severed ByteDance's original values.

Although tens of thousands of small and medium-sized customers are regular employees of ByteDance, their management model is clearly separated from other employees, and many of them have different work areas and benefits than other business employees. They can't even enter ByteDance's intranet "headline circle", receive information from the intranet, and cannot participate in discussions and interactions with other colleagues on the intranet. Their email address is also suffixed with the word "ad" to remind them that they are from the sales team of small and medium-sized accounts.

In 2021, as ByteDance reduced costs and increased efficiency as a whole, the team that was not as productive as expected was quickly laid off, and a few people had the opportunity to move to other businesses that required a sales force.

"In ByteDance, the biggest order is out of order." An HR person from ByteDance said. Employees do not have clear expectations to rise when they enter the company, and can only rely on themselves to slowly explore; And the almost disorderly business competition and high-pressure goals stimulate their nerves every day. But in reality, this chaotic looking system is never a problem during periods of high growth, because there are always new businesses and smart people joining here, so all the contradictions can be masked.

Projects with a start-up period and a project without a start-up period

In 2020, the total number of employees of ByteDance was close to 100,000, surpassing Baidu and Tencent, and second only to Alibaba among domestic Internet companies. But at the same time, its business growth is slowing.

Although Douyin can still contribute super high advertising revenue, this has nothing to do with most of ByteDance's business team. Toutiao's daily active users began to decline, and the education business, Feishu and game businesses did not improve significantly; There are not many new businesses that can really run, and e-commerce and local life are rare highlights, but they still need to rely on the Douyin system. The company is offering fewer opportunities to its employees.

For the first time this year, ByteDance proposed to "fatten and increase weight" to control costs and improve efficiency. Zhang Yiming mentioned hidden concerns in an internal employee speech. "The big tricks that I thought about at the beginning of the company's establishment have all been exhausted, and it is no longer easy for many businesses to make progress in order to make progress." A person present repeated. At the same time, "there are businesses where I don't know why I need so many people." ”

In March 2020, ByteDance announced an organizational restructuring, and Liang Rubo took over the HR business from Huawei Wei. No other ByteDance executive has the trust he has built up after working with Zhang for more than 20 years like Liang Rubo, from classmates to the management of a $100 billion company.

Liang Rubo is Zhang Yiming's college classmate and roommate. Zhang Yiming mentioned this friend many times in interviews in his early years. While studying, his computer host was stolen, and only the monitor remained, so he persuaded Liang Rubo to buy a host and share it with them. Since Zhang Yiming's first entrepreneurial project "Nine Nine Rooms", the two have been entrepreneurial partners. ByteDance is the second company the two co-founded.

In the two ventures with Zhang Yiming, Liang Rubo was initially in charge of technology. Prior to taking over as Head of Human Resources, Liang Rubo was the Head of Feishu and Efficiency Engineering.

However, compared with Hua Wei, Liang Rubo is very low-key internally, and many newcomers have not even heard of his name. Liang's style is also softer. During his tenure as head of HR, he was unable to onboard someone he liked due to opposition from his subordinates. "Hua Wei will not make such a compromise." A senior HR at ByteDance said.

Unlike Hua Wei, who trusts his own judgment, Liang Rubo tends to learn from the management experience of external mature companies. After he took over the HR business, he quickly drove two things ——— further improve the efficiency of the HR department; Build a set of organizational development and talent training system.

In 2020, ByteDance's various businesses have ended a period of rapid expansion, and Liang Rubo believes that more standardized recruitment tasks should be completed at the group level to free up more manpower to do organizational construction.

The international business was used as a pilot - the HR department tried to establish a group-level recruitment center to consolidate the recruitment of these businesses, but the breakthrough did not go well. These products seem to be isolated overseas and touch on less internal interests, but in fact, most of these products and early teams are born out of domestic business teams, such as TikTok for Douyin, TopBuzz for Toutiao, and Buzzvideo for Watermelon Video. There are businesses that are ostensibly willing, and they take advantage of the poor information and only hand over the right to recruit in some remote countries and partial positions.

In order to further strengthen organizational capabilities and talent development, Liang Rubo also promoted the separation of the organizational development department from the performance team, and appointed Yuan Lingzi, the former head of Greater China at Wills Tiwers Watsons, a British consulting firm, as the head of the Greater China region. She also recruited Yufei Chen, who was previously a senior talent management manager at Bosch China, to head the talent development center.

The newly formed teams began conducting company visits, organizing internal learning weeks and developing leadership programs. But there are also things that employees are puzzled about, such as asking outside experts to talk about "growth theory" and "how to build sales capabilities" for employees. These are precisely the capabilities that ByteDance is best at and least lacking.

In May 2021, with the transfer of Liang Rubo to CEO of ByteDance, Hua Wei returned to the human resources business department, and the reform was hastily completed. Only half a year after his return, Hua Wei dissolved the Talent Development Center. "Some functions may be valuable in other companies, but they are out of touch with the needs of our company and should not be." He explained at an internal meeting of the team.

In July of the following year, the Organizational Development Department was also abolished and related functions were dismantled. Among them, the work of organizational structure design is transferred to the Institute of Management; Governance and compliance related to human resources transferred to the Human Resources and Management Project Management Office; The talent center is responsible for the transfer policy and operation; Employee research was entrusted to the corporate culture department.

ByteDance's organizational system has returned to that "always entrepreneurial" look. But the difference is that ByteDance is no longer a startup, and the organizational problems and contradictions accumulated over the years still exist: in 2021, ByteDance still has not established a perfect rank system. It used to think that "going to war" was the best path to promotion, and as there were fewer and fewer successful new businesses, the company's employees became narrower and narrower.

ByteDance also began to rigorously calculate ROI (input-output ratio). Many businesses and products that fail to align ROI are downgraded or shut down. In 2022, ByteDance has successively removed the Xiaohongshu-like product Kesong, the social product Party Island, and the information product recognition area that is considered to be a high-end version of today's headlines.

Long-used management tools are also fading. ByteDance has a dashboard that detects OKRs (Objectives and Key Results Method) filled out by all employees. Starting in 2020, "OKR fill rates continued to decline. A ByteDance strategist with knowledge of the situation said.

OKR, a management tool that Zhang Yiming liked after a trip around Silicon Valley, is used to identify and track goals and their completion, and is also considered a concentrated embodiment of ByteDance's corporate culture. In mid-2016, Zhang Yiming disclosed his OKR to all employees for the first time.

OKR is a useful tool when new business is constantly coming out and the team needs to sprint to the goal; But when the growth is gone, the value of OKRs is discounted. One ByteDance HR said that it would actually take a week or more to develop a qualified OKR, with almost 25% of that time spent aligning with team members. "New managers are generally under business pressure, and few spend so much time writing a good OKR." A ByteDance HRBP said.

Starting in 2021, Zhang Yiming no longer writes OKRs. In his internal letter as CEO, he explained that he was not satisfied with all three OKRs in the past year and that he should think about longer-term OKRs in the new year. And more and more business leaders are hiding their OKRs, or some key information points. A few months later, the OKR Enhancement Department of the ByteDance Management Research Institute no longer required employees in the department to fill out OKRs. The core of this department is to study the use of OKRs within the company.

Since the end of 2022, Byte's HR department has begun to try to make changes, setting up rotating committees according to different businesses, functions and regions, and letting HRBP leaders of each business unit manage HR-related matters in turn. This is a management experiment done by Hua Wei. Previously, TikTok had a similar adjustment.

A person familiar with the matter said that because ByteDance has multiple business lines and global nature, HRBP's work requires simultaneous coordination of business units, functional middle offices and regional countries, so job rotation is considered to help strengthen cross-departmental cooperation.

HR is becoming more specialized in bytes, and the proportion of recruitment in daily work is gradually decreasing. It is also part of a company that ends its startup period and gradually grows into a large, mature company.