Zoom's chief people officer says that the company is hiring beyond its original goals to support its huge usage boom, but that the challenge is growing sustainably as recession looms

• Zoom needs to hire many more employees to help support the huge influx of new users its gotten amid the coronavirus pandemic - it boasts 200 million daily active users as of the end of March, up from 10 million in December.
• Zoom's Chief People Officer, Lynne Oldham, said the company already had ambitious hiring goals this year, but it needs to hire even above that level to fill roles that deal with helping customers like technical support engineers and customer success managers.
• However, Zoom is also taking the overall economic climate into account: Oldham says that Zoom expects that much of the demand for its product will remain even once the crisis has passed, but that it also wants to be careful that it doesn't hire more people than it needs as customers tighten their IT budgets.
• "We're just gonna we're gonna watch and see as things develop...part of the unknown of all that is how much of the world is going to sort of stay focused on not necessarily being in the office all the time," Oldham said.
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Zoom has seen both its usage and its stock price multiply as the coronavirus pandemic has thrust the company into the spotlight. With shelter in place mandates, people are turning to Zoom for work meetings, happy hours and classes.

The company has 200 million daily active users as of the end of March, a huge leap from the 10 million it had at the end of December.

In order to support all those new users, the company is hiring a lot: Zoom has listed 252 new job positions from the start of its fiscal year on February 1 through the end of March, according to Thinknum Media, which tracks such data. Now, it seems, Zoom is going to step it up further.

"We did have an extremely ambitious hiring goal already for this year," Lynne Oldham, Zoom's chief people officer, told Business Insider. "So where we're seeing additional need is around the places that we touch the customer."

By way of example, Oldham said that the company is prioritizing hiring for technical support, which can help everyone from free users to large enterprises ensure Zoom works properly. The 100-plus people working in technical support roles right now are struggling to keep up the huge onslaught of new users, she said. In the short term, the company is bringing in temporary technical support workers to bolster its forces by working with staffing agencies. That's in addition to 10 open tech support engineer roles it's hiring directly right now, and may still add more.

Another key area where it will focus hiring is customer success, the team at Zoom that helps new clients get onboarded and situated with using it. Again, Zoom's huge crush of new users threatens to overwhelm that team, meaning that it needs to bring in more manpower than it had originally planned.

"We can't keep up that pace with the same number that we anticipated because... key to making sure the customer's happy is making sure they have somebody to talk to as they onboard, as they get used to using the tool," Oldham said.

These two areas are especially important for Zoom as it faces tough questions about the privacy and security of its product: Among their other duties, the tech support and customer success teams help clients configure their settings to prevent "Zoombombing" incidents where trolls or hackers share spam and indecent messages in a Zoom call.

Additionally, while education and healthcare have become important industries for Zoom right now, the company was already planning to hire many more salespeople focused on those industries. Zoom now has about 90,000 schools using its platform for online learning, after it made the product free for educational institutions.

Zoom is also hiring for numerous engineering roles and sales roles, much of which was planned before the coronavirus pandemic. While Zoom is now feeling both opportunity and urgency to grow, it's hard to ignore the larger economic reality that's putting pressure on companies large and small, Oldham said.

"Companies are shrinking all around us," she said.

Balancing the need for growth with the economic climate

Oldham says that while the company is trying to stay realistic, it's also likely that it will continue to see elevated levels of usage even after the coronavirus crisis has passed. There was already a trend towards remote work before, and Zoom expects it to accelerate now that many companies have seen how well it can work.

In fact, she says, remote work can help companies cut costs as budgets shrink, given that it diminishes or eliminates the need for physical office space - and that Zoom can help make that a reality.

"We are already in a recession...if companies are having to shrink, I mean, what would you sacrifice first, your real estate or your people? So I think there'll be a lot of thought around this and whether it makes sense to stay somewhat remote," Oldham said.

Also working in Zoom's favor is that there's no shortage of interest from potential job candidates. Oldham said that her counterparts at other tech companies are even sending potential engineering candidates her way.

At the same time, Oldham says, Zoom CEO Eric Yuan always prefers to be cautious with hiring, because he never wants to be put in the position of holding mass layoffs down the line. It's a tricky balance between hiring enough to support the company's current boom, but not so much that it becomes unsustainable later.

So while temporary technical support workers are helping handle the surge right now, Oldham said Zoom will hopefully be able to bring on some of those people for full time roles down the line, though she also said its difficult to predict what that will look like, given all the uncertainty.

"We're just gonna we're gonna watch and see as things develop...part of the unknown of all that is how much of the world is going to sort of stay focused on not necessarily being in the office all the time. So the need may not go away at the same rate it came on," Oldham said.

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