This post originally appeared on Business Insider.
July 18 was a big day at Yahoo: It announced its second-quarter earnings and took the final bids for the auction of its core business, which eventually sold to Verizon.
But it appears that day marked the start of a new trend at Yahoo as well—a massive hiring spree.
According to Yahoo’s U.S. careers page, the company posted 76 new job openings on July 18. Two days later, it posted a whopping 151 new job openings.
And this week, after announcing its sale to Verizon on Monday, Yahoo has posted 23 openings on July 25, 16 on July 26, and 19 on July 27.
That’s a big increase from the previous two months, during which there wasn’t a day when Yahoo’s careers page posted a double-digit number of U.S. job openings.
It’s unclear what’s driving this change, but it’s a strange development given that Yahoo’s going through a 15 percent workforce reduction plan and a massive reorganization as a result of its sale to Verizon.
Most of the jobs are located in Yahoo’s Sunnyvale, California, headquarters with a heavy focus on engineering. A lot of the jobs require experience in mobile and ad technology—the two areas Yahoo’s been investing in more heavily.
The sudden uptick in the number of new jobs could be interpreted in a lot of ways.
It could be a sign of high turnover and Yahoo filling those empty positions. It could also be a result of Yahoo replacing less productive jobs with newly created positions focused on its higher growth areas. Maybe it’s just a sign of Yahoo pushing forward with some of its previous plans. Or it could simply be a backlog of job openings being pushed out after a predetermined date.
Still, it’s curious that this happened right after closing the auction for its core business, and at a time when investors are calling for cost reductions across the company. And one has to wonder how much success Yahoo will have filling the jobs at a time of such uncertainty about the company’s future.
Yahoo’s spokesperson sent the following statement in response to this story:
Yahoo is hiring to the company’s strategic plan we laid out in February, and our People team uses a clustered hiring approach and a functional recruiting model. Of the 100 new Yahoos who have joined in the last two weeks, nearly one-fifth of them are boomerangs, and every one is excited to start work accelerating and amplifying Yahoo’s efforts.
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