Facebook is preparing to increase staff by 50 percent this year to take advantage of the surplus of talent caused by the recession says CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

“No one else has been hiring,” said Zuckerberg, adding that, “It’s been a great environment for us because the economy has helped out.”

Still this hiring frenzy will be no small task for Facebook. The company plans on adding 500 hires to its existing employee base of 1,000.

This is a curious move as the company is just on the cusp of attaining profitability this year. Zuckerberg himself says that the company is trying to keep a lid on costs, but employees are generally a company’s largest fixed costs.

Employees are the one area that Zuckerberg is openly investing in. He plans to keep employees in Facebook’s current unfinished concrete offices he calls. “the bunker.”

Zuckerberg notes that lavish office space can signal to employees that a company is successful and he wants to keep the mind-set that Facebook is still in its early stages. However keeping that startup mentality alive is no small task as employee rolls grow into the thousands.

With Facebook’s annual revenue tracking as high as $500 million this year and generous investments in the bank, Zuckerberg apparently isn’t feeling pressure to turn a profit this year.

Facebook became the world’s largest social networking site earlier this year. The site is growing rapidly and Zuckerberg recently set one billion users as its goal.

However the revenue stream from Facebook is still dominated by display advertising. The online advertising market has been soft this year and may not see growth until the middle of next year.

There are rumors that Facebook is preparing to launch a top secret payment exchange that might make Facebook less reliant on online advertising revenue. Whatever Zuckerberg’s plans are for growth, he’s not ready to start pinching pennies quite yet.

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Entry was posted on Monday, August 24th, 2009 at 9:56 am under Advertising, Social Media, Technology.

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