Meituan said to plan 60,000 new hires this year to double its workforce

To meet business expansion needs, China’s largest food-delivery platform Meituan plans to hire 60,000 people in 2021, according to LatePost.

Meituan is on the verge of becoming the next Internet company to surge to the size of 100,000 employees in a short period of time, following Byte Dance, the report said.

Meituan had 46,000 full-time employees before going public in June 2018, with salespeople making up 61 percent of the workforce. The number of employees grew steadily over the next two years, reaching 57,000 in June 2020. And the pace of hiring accelerated after that, and Meituan's headcount swelled to nearly 70,000 employees six months later.

Meituan set a goal of hiring 60,000 people in early 2021, which it plans to accomplish within a year, LatePost said.

The 60,000 people are needed mainly for basic positions in logistics and marketing to serve Meituan's community group buying business, Meituan Youxuan, and its B2B restaurant supply chain business, Kuailv.

Meituan plans to bring in 6,000 to 10,000 people through campus recruiting. Meituan's human resources department estimates that the company will also have a natural outflow of 20,000 people during the year, according to the report.

Meituan has more than 1,000 HRs, with about 200 of them serving the hiring program. "Hiring 60,000 people is just the beginning," said a person familiar with Meituan.

As a platform that offers a wide range of services, Meituan's move comes as no surprise.

Earlier this year, Dali Education, the education brand owned by ByteDance, announced on Feb. 26 that it would hire 10,000 people over the next four months.

The hiring, which includes a number of positions in teaching and research, R&D, and operations, is another large-scale social hiring by ByteDance for its education business after last March.

This recruitment covers several products under Dali Education, including Chingbei, GuaGuaLong, OpenLanguage, etc. The job areas cover several Chinese cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen.

Dali Education currently has over 10,000 employees. After this round of hiring, Dali Education will have more than 20,000 employees.