SAN FRANCISCO -- The clearest sign yet of Yahoo's turnaround? People are clamoring to work there again.
Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer said Wednesday that the company now gets 12,000 resumes a week, about a fivefold increase since she took the top job in July 2012. The tech giant currently has 12,000 employees, so "for every job we have, we get a resume each week," she said.
The increase in applications is a reflection of Mayer's efforts to make Yahoo cool again, and to return the company to growth. Employee perks like free food and iPhones -- hallmarks of her former employer, Google -- don't hurt the recruitment efforts, either.
Mayer attributed the company's latest success to a focus on four areas: people, products, traffic and revenue. Doing well in one leads to greater success in the others, she says.
"They are a chain reaction," she said in an interview on stage at TechCrunch's Disrupt conference. "You have to get the right people there before you can build the right products. Once you have that usage," it's easier to attract advertisers.
On the traffic side, Mayer said Wednesday that Yahoo has surpassed 800 million monthly active users worldwide. The surge, about a 20 percent increase since Mayer took over, is largely due to increased traffic to the company's mobile offerings. Yahoo has about 350 million mobile users. Mayer said the company is also seeing higher traffic to its email, homepage and search products. (The spike does not include the social blogging site Tumblr, which Yahoo purchased this year.)
Another sign of success: Employee attrition is down markedly, and people who left the company are coming back. Mayer said she has focused on attracting former Yahoo'ers, whom she calls "boomerangs." About 10 percent of Yahoo's hires this year have been Yahoo alumni.
The turnaround efforts are also reflected in Yahoo's stock price, which has risen 88 percent since Mayer joined. Some of the gains can be credited to the company's investments in Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba, and its joint venture, Yahoo Japan.
But an additional focus on the company's products helps, Mayer said. She pointed to the redesign of Yahoo News and the decision to buy the exclusive streaming rights to past episodes of "Saturday Night Live" as examples of products she's happy about.
And, as expected, she defended the company's controversial logo change after interviewer Michael Arrington asked, "What the f--- happened here?" Mayer quickly pointed out that, prior to the redesign, about "87% of our employees wanted something different."
The new logo, she said, represented the company's "scrappy" culture. Yahoo didn't hire an outside branding agency or an expensive marketing firm. Instead, Mayer hunkered down with other Yahoo employees to redesign it over a weekend.
"We really pride ourselves at Yahoo as being the world’s largest start-up," she said. "We didn’t spend millions of dollars doing it. ... We did it in a way that came from a very authentic place."
first appeared on linkedin.com
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