ByteDance, the Chinese tech startup behind TikTok, is on a hiring spree this year and reportedly plans to create 40,000 new jobs around the globe. This is far beyond earlier projections of 6,000 new hires, and likely comes from a combination of usage spike and ambitious business strategy. On the one hand, the COVID-19 pandemic has seen ByteDance's social media channels gain immense popularity. On the other hand, the company plans to expand into video gaming and e-commerce on top of its huge app library, and ByteDance CEO Zhang Yiming has declared that the company's target is to have 100,000 staff around the world by the end of 2020.

The company has so far opened almost 10,000 positions this month, a third of which are high-level research and software coding roles. Another third are products and operations roles. While the majority of positions are located in China, ByteDance is also hiring for hundreds of positions in the other locations where it operates, including India, the UK, the US, and Singapore, where it has already been poaching talent from the local offices of Google, Facebook, and other tech firms.

ByteDance is not the only Chinese social media company to buck the trend that has seen dozens of other tech startups struggle. Last month, Tencent announced it was planning to hire several thousand more mid-career recruits than it had originally planned, as demand for its services skyrocketed amid workplace shutdowns and a spike in remote work.