Alibaba group holding (BABA, Financial) has emerged as one of the fastest growing e-commerce businesses. As the biggest e-commerce firm in China, the company has all it takes to fight the vicious war of online marketing. The company offers three types of businesses to be conducted online - B2B, B2C and C2C. The trustworthy and genuinely safe electronic payment service, fast search engines for shopping and excellent cloud computing services have helped it earn a very good reputation in a very short time span.
Alibaba’s new business location
Recently, Alibaba started making advancements in the market. It chose the U.S. to operate business outside its home turf. If industry sources are to be believed, Alibaba is present in Seattle and is looking to hire people. Almost three positions have been opened for the potential employees, who will be given placements in any of the three offices of Alibaba – including offices in Silicon Valley, Seattle, or the Beijing headquarters. As the company intends to expand its business, it is obvious that it requires some excellent candidates to boost its market share. It has almost 300 employees in America, which is barely enough to carry out all the required tasks, and hence the heavy human resources shortfall is what Alibaba is experiencing right now. The news circulating widely in the business circles is that Alibaba is poaching away employees from competitors. Microsoft (MSFT, Financial), Facebook (FB, Financial) and Amazon (AMZN, Financial) are the companies that Alibaba is targeting and luring employees from. As of March 4, Alibaba opened its first Silicon Valley office offering services in the cloud computing niche, something that makes it a direct competitor with Amazon's AWS. It currently has a strong engineering team of ten that provides cloud services. Upon being asked by the media about the hiring issue, the company didn’t respond and didn't appear to be interested in making any comments. It neither denied nor confirmed if it is indeed poaching employees from rivals. The manger is reported to have said that the company is looking forward to hire “young and fresh blood” to aid in data mining, cloud computing and machine learning, there was no mention of any hiring strategy.
Alibaba vs. Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook
According to Linkedin (LNKD, Financial), the leading online professional networking platform in the recent past, a lot of top former employees of Microsoft have joined Alibaba. Thought it isn't known in what capacity they joined with Alibaba, it is clear that they left Microsoft to join hands with the emerging e-commerce giant, which has experienced explosive growth in the very recent past. Almost 20 people, who previously held top positions with Fortune 500 tech companies, have been recruited by the Chinese firm.
Concluding thoughts
Poaching employees from rivals, by providing more money, bonuses or higher and more reputed positions, is not uncommon. In the corporate world, this continues to happen, and since the e-commerce industry is experiencing an unprecedented growth, it is only natural for people to want to be a part of it. If Microsoft or Amazon’s employees are leaving the company to join Alibaba, this clearly points to a single thing – Alibaba offers better work, monetary and growth opportunities that a lot of the big names don’t globally. If Microsoft, Facebook and Amazon are really serious about retaining workforce, then employees should be offered better incentives.
