Microsoft Growing Fast: Hiring More Employees

Microsoft has also released new details about its employees in the wake of the announcement of its latest business figures. The group increased the number of employees by more than 23,000 people within one year – more than (almost) never before.

As the colleagues from Geekwire report, citing the latest earnings report from Microsoft, Microsoft hired 23,500 new employees within one year. This increased the number of employees in the company by a full 14 percent. A total of around 190,000 people in various countries now work for the software giant.

Microsoft has never grown so fast except with the Nokia failure

According to the report, there has never been such strong growth in history – apart from the acquisition of Nokia’s Devices & Services division in 2014, which however quickly turned out to be a failure. Microsoft grew despite extremely adverse circumstances, also because the group is getting through the global coronavirus pandemic much better than many other companies.

Around 14,000 of the newly hired employees were most recently brought on board outside the USA. This means that the proportion of new international hires was around 60 percent. Nevertheless, 57 percent and thus the majority of Microsoft employees are still located in the USA. Within the US, growth was the greatest outside of Microsoft’s home region, with only 1250 of the approximately 9500 new US employees in and around Seattle.

Number of employees more than doubled in ten years

Overall, Microsoft has more than doubled its workforce in a decade. In September 2011 around 90,000 people worked for the group – at the end of September 2021, there were exactly 189,984. At the same time, the structure of the workforce is changing increasingly. Today, more and more people are involved in day-to-day operations and services, while the proportion of employees in research and development has declined. This is due, among other things, to a larger proportion of services that have to be kept running.

The lion’s share of the latest growth is due, among other things, to the takeover of Zenimax Media, after all, Microsoft has also taken over the approximately 2,300 employees of studios such as Bethesda Softworks. In the near future, the number of employees could continue to rise, after all, Microsoft is busy buying up the language specialist Nuance.

Incidentally, the large number of employees expressly does not include the many externally employed people who work for Microsoft through temporary agencies or as so-called contractors on a project basis. In total, there are likely to be a few tens of thousands more people.